After moving to Milan between 1908 and 1909, as attested by notes in his diary, Umberto Boccioni painted landscapes of the countryside of Lombardy as an important way of honing his technique and consolidating his architectonic sense of the work in pursuit of a solid structural framework of vision. 

As though in an effort to encompass and capture all the aspects of external reality and then transpose them into another dimension, Boccioni anxiously pondered what he had learned from Giacomo Balla in Rome before 1906 about a form of representation capable of transmuting the fact of nature into a more universal realm, while also contemplating the work of Gaetano Previati, under whose spell he had fallen. The entry in the artist’s diary for 25 April 1908 records his tormented thoughts: 

“The fear or indeed dread of not being good at drawing, chiaroscuro and colouring (according to what culture, tradition and teaching have instilled in me), this is the great obstacle to freeing my wings. The constant study of reality, awareness of my inferiority in reproducing it with respect to how I see it, and the fact of never having worked imaginatively have caused my few ideas to be stillborn for fear of inadequate execution. […] It is the dread of matter that suffocates me.”¹ 

With a perspective approach already tried out in Campagna romana (Roman Countryside, 1903, Lugano, Museo Civico di Belle Arti, formerly Chiattone Collection), the artist shifts the axis with which the distant outlines of tenements and factories are aligned so as to accentuate the horizontal nature of the painting in a space set in motion by flowing strokes of colour that sometimes seem to convey the crystalline impression of a clear day in the rendering of lively effects of light. The tonality of the work is governed by cool shades and combinations, as in the choice of greens and blues, lightened in the sky by rosy shades or darkened by the browns of the tree trunks and the shadows on the meadow. A large mulberry tree occupies most of the part on the left and generates a visual trajectory connecting the row of trees between it and the background in a diagonal. The works painted in the countryside around Milan were bought by the printer Gabriele Chiattone, with whom Boccioni collaborated actively, and by Enrico Minetti (1866-1939), a leading Italian businessman at the turn of the century as well as the organiser of the Brescia car rally in 1896 and its racing circuit in 1906. The artist watched the race there the following year. The entry in Boccioni’s diary for 24 August 1908 reads as follows: “To Cav. Minetti of the Touring Club, Via Monforte 46, eight landscapes [presumably including Campagna con gelsi], two in pastel, and a well thought-out seascape painted in Venice. 100 lire.”² The important contact with the Touring Club, for which Boccioni painted a series of works in tempera on fox hunting and cars, began in Rome and continued in Milan as from 1906 with Innocenzo Massimino and Enrico Minetti. A cover of the association’s monthly magazine (anno XIV, no. 4, April 1908) attests to a passion then transposed with Futurism from 1910 into an effort to capture the essence of dynamism and speed. 

Ester Coen 

¹ Birolli 1971, p. 304. 

² Ibid., p. 311.