In any case, Orto presso I Cappuccini encapsulates various facets of Baccarini’s art, including naturalism, keen observation of the real world and small everyday details, and a combination of lyricism and objectivity, all very much in harmony with certain Italian poets of the turn of the century, especially Giovanni Pascoli.

Domenico Baccarini was one of the leading figures in the transitional twilight phase of the early 20th century, leading up to the birth of an authentically modern Italian art that saw the move from the aestheticism of the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio to late Symbolism, Divisionism of an intimate and social character and the first steps towards Futurism. A contemporary of Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, Baccarini lived for practically all of his very short life in his hometown of Faenza. This was interspersed with important periods in Florence, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti between 1900 and 1903 and where he met Lorenzo Viani, as well as Rome, Venice and Milan. A painter, one of the most gifted draughtsmen of his generation (and soon recognised as such by critics, as the unconditional esteem of Vittorio Pica attests), a sculptor and one of the leading practitioners of Italian Art Nouveau, he was also the leader of a group known as the Cenacolo Baccariniano,¹ which played an important part in the culture of the Romagna region at the turn of the century. 

Within the sphere of Baccarini’s stylistic and thematic versatility, which ranges from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to social divisionism, the Orto presso i Cappuccini (Market Garden near the Capuchin Monastery) is one of his most accomplished landscapes, a genre he took up in 1901, mostly in small works of thickly applied paint and misty, twilight atmospheres, as exemplified by his small, sketch-like Venetian nocturnes. 

This painting, bought by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 1990 after visiting the Bagliore e oscurità exhibition organised by Paul Nicholls Studio on the occasion of the X International Antiques Fair in Milan, is one of a series devoted to the Capuchin monastery in Faenza, destroyed during World War II and immediately rebuilt. The known works include Le mura del convento dei Cappuccini (The Walls of the Capuchin Monastery) (1903, Faenza, Pinacoteca Civica), characterised by a free approach to the Divisionist technique alternating dots and lines and marks made with the handle of the brush, and Il Convento dei Cappuccini sotto la neve (The Capuchin Monastery in the Snow) present location unknown,² as well as a few drawings in the Pinacoteca Civica, Faenza. Two of these, each entitled Veduta dello stradello dei Cappuccini (View of the Little Road of the Capuchin Monastery),³ display similarities with the painting in question. In any case, Orto presso I Cappuccini encapsulates various facets of Baccarini’s art, including naturalism, keen observation of the real world and small everyday details, and a combination of lyricism and objectivity, all very much in harmony with certain Italian poets of the turn of the century, especially Giovanni Pascoli.⁴ 

Probably painted immediately after his return to Faenza from Rome in 1904, the work appears to display the imprint of that experience. Contact with the capital and the group of artists in the circle of Giovanni Prini, including Balla, Boccioni and Severini, stimulated Baccarini to devote renewed attention to the painting of figures and landscapes, some of which were shown in June the same year in the offices of the newspaper La Patria, for which he worked. With respect to Balla and the others, however, while addressing some of the same themes, Baccarini was more concerned with the naturalistic rendering of the whole and less with questions of light and perception. Despite the cool tonalities of the painting - the different shades of green, brown and pink are bathed in the clear light typical of a sunless day with no bold contrasts, while the buildings and trees in the background are outlined in dark blue - the quick, curling brushstrokes succeed nonetheless in imparting a vibrant rhythm through the alternation of larger and smaller patches of colour. 

The back of the canvas (fig. 1) presents a Divisionist painting in broad strokes of a male figure in a hat that bears some similarity to the drawing I mietitori (The Reapers) (1906, Faenza, Pinacoteca Civica). This subject is also addressed in other drawings of the same year, 1906, and parallels can be drawn with the work of Pellizza da Volpedo in that period. 

Matteo Piccioni 

¹ Faenza 1983, Faenza 2007. 

² Ravenna-Faenza 2007, p. 237, no. III. 4. 

³ Ibid., nos. IV.78 and IV.79.

 ⁴ Sapori 1928.