“It is as though the painter’s spirit sought to express itself through inspiration, reducing substance to the bare minimum, while the brushstroke becomes increasingly feverish, jagged and agitated so to appear sometimes uncertain and shaky.”

Silvestro Lega attained his artistic maturity in the early 1860s, when he withdrew to Piagentina on the outskirts of Florence and began to depict scenes of domestic life in which analytical rigour of a positivist origin is combined with a touch of poetic melancholy. As noted by Diego Martelli in connection with Canto dello stornello (1867), the formal approach, informed by the purism of his master Luigi Mussini, was born out of reflection on the Tuscan art of the 15th century. Having overcome the spiritual crisis that followed the end of this extraordinary period in his painting and personal life, the artist’s style evolved away from the studied compositional framework towards a more vibrant and dynamic approach, as exemplified by the portrait of the dying Giuseppe Mazzini based on sketches from life made in Pisa in March 1872. This marked the start of a focus on portraiture, a genre also addressed in his youth, with results distinguished by their emotive intensity and psychological involvement, especially when the subjects were artist friends like Francesco Gioli, Arnold Böcklin and Rinaldo Carnielo. The 1880s saw increasingly rapid and exuberant brushwork, described as “agitated” by Mario Tinti, and darker, more dramatic colour, enlivened here and there with dashes of bright red and acid green. This is the characteristic style of the works painted at Gabbro in the countryside outside Livorno, where Lega spent long periods in the last decade of this life, alternating portraits of the ladies of the Bandini Rosselmini family with paintings of the local women, often painted half-length with a thematic repetition suggesting that the subject was nothing other than a pretext for pictorial experimentation. His work on the use of colour to create form became a model for the young Florentine artists involved in the renewal of figurative art, especially Plinio Nomellini and Angelo Torchi. 

Confirmation of Lega’s interest in assessing the pictorial possibilities of the same theme in the years when he painted the peasant women of Gabbro is provided by two extraordinary portraits of women in pink cloaks, one of hieratic solemnity and the other more dramatic. In the former, the pure draughtsmanship instilled by Mussini is combined splendidly with the vibrancy of quick, jagged brushstrokes reverberating with light in a nuanced range of pinks with minimal touches of blue. The work exemplifies the mastery attained by Lega in the depiction of figures that are deftly simplified but engage the emotions through the evocative power of colour, described by Mario Tinti as increasingly “refined and spiritualised”. Tinti also provides this penetrating insight into works of this nature: “It is as though the painter’s spirit sought to express itself through inspiration, reducing substance to the bare minimum, while the brushstroke becomes increasingly feverish, jagged and agitated so to appear sometimes uncertain and shaky.”¹ 

Having appeared on the art market on the eve of the Great War and been purchased for the collection of Mario Galli, the painting discussed here resurfaced in 1961 as a reproduction in Mario Borgiotti’s I grandi pittori dell’Ottocento italiano. With its selection of little-known but excellent works, this book played a crucial part in rekindling the interest of collectors in the art of the Macchiaioli during the period of Italy’s economic boom. The painting was purchased for the Cerruti Collection in 1986 from the Florentine dealer Damiano Lapiccirella. 

Silvestra Bietoletti 

¹ Tinti 1923, p. 221.