With the immediacy and freshness of colour that already distinguished his landscapes in this period, Delleani depicts the 17thcentury parish church of Santa Maria Assunta in the centre of the small town [...].

Lorenzo Delleani’s long and successful period as a history and genre painter began even before the end of his studies at the Accademia Albertina, as attested by the presentation of his Episodio dell’assedio di Ancona (Episode from the Siege at Ancona) at the Turin Promotrice exhibition in 1860. It was the early 1880s that then saw a shift towards greater spontaneity and realism in accordance with the suggestions of critics, who urged him to devote more of his energies to painting from life (“studio del vero”¹) and landscape. The latter had in fact been an albeit marginal part of his production since his youth. As the art critic Angelo Dragone rightly observes, this was not really a “conversion” to realism and landscape.² In the late 1860s, while producing his complex scenes from Venetian history in period dress, Delleani had already painted some small landscapes in oils as studies for backgrounds, or simply as notes on elements of architecture or setting. It was in 1878 that he began to paint from life on small panels measuring about 23 x 15 cm (the assicella piccola, in use until 1881) but not until the winter of 1880-81 that he showed the first of these works, at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin, to significant approval on the part of critics and the public. Always highly attentive to the commercial side of his profession, Delleani immediately stepped up his production, alternating work in the studio during the winter months with painting en plein air. He is thought to have produced about three thousand small panels during his career with landscapes of his customary haunts, above all in his native province of Biella, to which he remained deeply attached throughout his life, and of places visited on travels inside and outside Italy. Nearly all of these were completed in one go, taking less than an hour,³ and precisely dated. 

In this case, the panel bears not only the signature and date (25 June 1881) on the front but also a dedication to the artist’s friend Vittorio Sclopis (Rivoli, 1844 - Turin, 1918), an engineer and a brilliant entrepreneur in the chemical industry, the first in Italy to embark - in the family firm, active since 1812 in the Borgo Dora district of Turin - on the production of sulphuric acid with pyrites mined at Brosso in Alta Valchiusella, a few kilometres from Drusacco. With the immediacy and freshness of colour that already distinguished his landscapes in this period, Delleani depicts the 17thcentury parish church of Santa Maria Assunta in the centre of the small town (now part of the municipality of Vico Canavese). The view is not of the main façade but rather the side of the church on Via Monte Marzo with its characteristic porch jutting out into a space where a small group of women dressed in dark blue, white and red stand out against the bright green of the grass. As Angelo Dragone wrote in his monumental monograph on Delleani, the result is a “symphony of crumbling walls animated by vivid patches of colour”.⁴ It is not clear whether the work was then already in the possession of Francesco Federico Cerruti, but the Turinese critic records it as having belonged to an as yet unidentified “collezione G.S., Torino (1948)”. The back of the panel bears the stamp of the “Schedario Dragone” (no. 2458), as well as the authentication of the Galleria Fogliato (no. 952), specialised in 19th-century Piedmontese art, where the work was exhibited in 1971. 

Monica Tomiato

¹ Filippi 1880, p. 49.

² Dragone P. 2000, p. 18.

³ Marini 2013, p. 216.

⁴ Dragone A. 1973-74, vol. I, p. 141.