With brushwork no longer subject to the demands of precise definition, flowing confidently to construct the view of meadows and trees casting shadows of varying depth, the artist sought to renew the pictorial and emotive values of landscape painting. 

Pietramala, a group of houses clustered around a mill on the Strada della Futa, the old road between Florence and Bologna, was one of the many places frequented by Telemaco Signorini in the years of his late maturity, when an inexhaustible desire to experiment with new forms of expression led him to embark on almost compulsive travels. 

With brushwork no longer subject to the demands of precise definition, flowing confidently to construct the view of meadows and trees casting shadows of varying depth, the artist sought to renew the pictorial and emotive values of landscape painting. The 17th-century Dutch landscapes that he had studied and copied in the Florentine galleries during his youth clearly inform this work, where a row of tall trees frames a view of fields and the stone walls of the old houses in the village, a recurrent subject of the paintings based on studies from life made at Pietramala in the summers of 1889 and 1890. 

“I spent 1890 painting in the mountains at Pietramala, the pastoral genre of goats, sheep and oxen. And 1891 too…” Contrary to this statement, in a biographical note sent to the president of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence to express his satisfaction at being made an honorary member,¹ the summers spent in the village in the Apennines between the regions of Tuscany and Emilia were those of 1889 and 1890, as attested by the dates written on many of the drawings made there. 

These drawings focus on the landscape and buildings of that rugged area rather than its inhabitants, as was instead the case with the countless drawings produced during the artist’s numerous stays in Settignano and Riomaggiore. The village must have attracted Signorini for its age-old appearance, far from the hustle and bustle of modern life. It is precisely the sense of unspoilt nature, where the silence is broken only by the noises of animals and the meadows stretch away as far as the ridge of mountains on the horizon, that is conjured up by this painting, as well as the others conceived at Pietramala. First presented to the public in 1953, the painting was then shown in the major exhibitions of the Macchiaioli school held in the last quarter of the 20th century in Munich and immediately afterwards at the Forte Belvedere in Florence. These events marked the renewed interest of scholars in that important movement and hence also of the more alert and sensitive collectors, including Cerruti. 

Silvestra Bietoletti 

¹ Somaré 1926, p. 279.