Shown half-length in three-quarter profile, the figure emerges from the vibrant dark background due to the deft use of colour, applied in quick, sure touches and modulated in density so as to highlight the face and expression. 

“Delleani a portrait painter? Most certainly. Suffice it to recall Il ritratto della sorella Irene a 21 anni and all the bust-length and half-length depictions that could be dated between 1887 and 1888 […] not to mention the other opportunities to address the human figure offered by two extraordinary works of painting: Il calderaio of 1888 and Nel giardino del convento of 1891.” In the catalogue of the exhibition of 2000-01 in Aosta, taking up a subject already addressed in his fundamental study Delleani, la vita, l’opera, il suo tempo (1974), Angelo Dragone thus rightly drew attention to the talent for portraiture of this painter of vivid images of family and friends, as well as people he encountered in the countryside and mountains in the province of Biella. The faithful leaving the church, children and priests (La lettura del breviario), peasant women old and young in their colourful traditional costumes (as in Vecchietta in costume dell’alto Biellese, cat. p. 600; La calza; Le comari), all were depicted with such sensitivity and purity as to be regarded as authentic portraits. This is also the case for the fine painting of an unknown country gentleman that Dragone dates around 1881-82 and cites as an example of Lorenzo Delleani’s characteristic style: “Sometimes glossy strokes imbued with light that is almost clotted on the brush […] an intelligent, good-natured face set off by a white collar that recalls the broad, fleshy petals of a magnolia: the astonishing knitting of the doublet standing out in transparency against the background of the panel, understood as colour, all worked in the relief of the buttons, juxtaposed with the interplay of the dark sleeves enlivened by those large wisteria-coloured decorative motifs, born out of the freest pictorial invention”.¹ Shown half-length in three-quarter profile, the figure emerges from the vibrant dark background due to the deft use of colour, applied in quick, sure touches and modulated in density so as to highlight the face and expression. While the quality of the execution is superb, this is not at the expense of the depth of psychological penetration. The figure is realistic and indeed seems alive, even though dressed in the clothes of another era. It is this choice of a portrait in period costume that forms a link with the history and genre painting that Delleani practiced assiduously for two decades before becoming an acclaimed landscape artist. In 1860, when still a pupil of Carlo Arienti at the Accademia Albertina, he showed his Episodio dell’assedio di Ancona at the Promotrice exhibition in Turin and gained the attention of critics and the general public with large-scale canvases on figures and events in Venetian history, with great attention to setting and characterisation. Formerly part of a private collection in Milan (1966)² and possibly of the Mastrangelo Collection (as suggested by an inscription on the back of the frame), the work was bought by Cerruti at a date that cannot be securely established on the basis of the records in his archives but was in any case before December 2000, when it appeared together with Acqua cheta (cat. p. 604) in the exhibition Lorenzo Delleani at the Museo Archeologico Regionale in Aosta. 

Monica Tomiato 

¹ A. Dragone, in Aosta 2000-01, p. 20. 

² See Dragone A. 1973-74, vol. II, p. 129.