She is portrayed full length against a neutral background completely devoid of spatial points of reference and filled with a hazy luminosity that sets off her rosy skin and makes the light blue of her dress gleam. 

In November 1868, after initial training at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and then at the Albertina in Turin followed by an interval of intense work as a painter in his hometown Intra, Daniele Ranzoni moved to Milan, where he immediately resumed his contact with the painter Tranquillo Cremona, his close friend, and the bohemian circles of the Scapigliatura (literally “disshevelled”) movement of artists and intellectuals who sought to rejuvenate Italian culture after the Risorgimento. This has been described as the first Italian avant-garde art movement. This period also saw frequent visits to Lake Maggiore as the guest of wealthy, cultured families of the international aristocracy, who offered him work as a portrait painter and teacher. His most valuable connections were with the Troubetzkoys, an ex-pat Russian princely couple, who provided him with a studio in their villa at Ghiffa and employed him to teach their children in 1873. It was there that Ranzoni embarked on his career as a society painter, which continued with a two-year stay in the English countryside of Somerset (1877-79) and establishment as a portrait painter to the gentry and the middle class, albeit without obtaining the official recognition he so desired.¹ In September 1879, embittered by the rejection of the paintings he had presented for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition and feeling unappreciated, he returned to Italy and work in Intra and Milan for the cultured and enlightened collectors of Lombardy, who stood by him despite the worsening of his mental illness. In 1885, he suffered a mental breakdown and was commited to an asylum for several months. In the years before his death in 1889, he had an acute, if tormented, creative flowering, making work of intense expressionistic quality. 

It was this late period of his career that saw the production of this small but intense female portrait, which can be dated to 1880, a year of great creativity in which Ranzoni showed no fewer than thirteen works, all painted by commission, at the Brera exhibition. This painting, which has a somewhat unclear provenance, was most likely presented posthumously at the 1890 exhibition of the Società Permanente delle Belle Arti in Milan,² as attested by the stamp and the imprint in sealing wax on the back, and rediscovered according to Anne Paule Quinsac³ on the occasion of the centenary exhibition.⁴ Attributed in the past to Cremona, it may have been mistaken, as Quinsac suggests, for another painting with the same subject but larger - the existence of which is, however, still uncertain - mentioned in the monograph on Ranzoni published in 1911 by Alfieri and Lacroix as “Ritratto di una cognata del Cremona. Grande olio. Propr. on. G. Gallina Milano”.⁵ The work shown in the photographic illustration is, however, the Cerruti panel. 

There is no question about the identification of the subject: Elisa Cagnoli, Cremona’s sister-in-law and his model during the 1870s for a large number of paintings and watercolours, including Costume di Sarzana, High Life and the well-known L’Edera (1878, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin). The beautiful Elisa, who had moved from Sarzana with her sister Carlotta to study bel canto singing in Milan (and is recalled by the writer Carlo Dossi in Note azzurre as one of the chaste loves of his youth) also appears in a watercolour by Cremona inside a photographer’s studio⁶ (fig. 1) in the same sedate pose as the panel, which Ranzoni may well have painted from a photo. 

She is portrayed full length against a neutral background completely devoid of spatial points of reference and filled with a hazy luminosity that sets off her rosy skin and makes the light blue of her dress gleam. As in other female portraits of the same period, the clothing and hair are rendered with free, fluid brushstrokes while the face is constructed out of a close array of small dashes of colour. The critic Luigi Chirtani, one of the first to recognise the quality and originality of Ranzoni’s painting, describes this as a sort of “precious pictorial fabric in which there is no trace of anything coarse or crude”.⁷ 

Formerly owned by the lawyer and member of parliament Giacinto Gallina (1863-1928), the painting was not sold with the rest of his collection (auctioned in November 1931 at the Galleria Scopinich in Milan) but remained in the possession of his daughter Anna Maria Turri until it was sold, some time before 1941, to Sebastiano Sandri. Together with other items belonging to this Turinese collector of 19th-century art, it entered the collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti in his villa at Rivoli at an unknown date but certainly after 1974 (see cat. pp. 552, 556, 578, 600, 606, 630). 

Monica Tomiato

¹ Quinsac 1997, p. 23.

² The author thanks Elisabetta Staudacher for this information.

³ Quinsac 1997, p. 182, no. 261.

⁴ Milan 1989c (not included in the catalogue).

⁵ Daniele Ranzoni 1911, p. 43, no. 23.

⁶ Bossaglia 1994, p. 178, no. 193.

⁷ L. Chirtani 1880, in Milan 2017, p. 86.