The bold colours used in the foreground to define the figures of the soldier, the carter and the uncompromisingly sideways donkey and mules with their red blankets stand out against the “extremely delicate, hazy tonalities” of the background, where the burnished hues of the vegetation fade away into the milky sky. 

A pupil of Giuseppe Bezzuoli at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and an habitué of the Caffè Michelangiolo, whose walls he decorated in 1853 with Il Trovatore, Giovanni Fattori won the Concorso Ricasoli in 1860 with Il campo italiano dopo la battaglia di Magenta. This also marked, however, his definitive abandonment of historical and literary subjects of a romantic character, a period that saw a number of small military scenes addressed with a highly personal interpretation of the approach to colour and light developed by the Macchiaioli to construct compositions that are both geometrically perfect and imbued with realism. Having gone back to live in Livorno, he worked in industrious solitude on portraiture and landscape, producing masterpieces like the painting of his first wife, Acquaiole livornesi and La Rotonda dei bagni Palmieri, works epitomising the attainment of a pictorial maturity now perfectly capable of expressing all the emotional potential of the subject through the utmost quality of form. His ability to create intrinsic analogies between subject matter and formal resolution enabled him to confer epic power and realism on the lives of the poor farmers, fishermen and soldiers now habitually featured in the works shown as from the 1870s in international exhibitions, from Vienna (1873) to London (1875) and Philadelphia (1876). He showed Viale Principe Amedeo a Firenze in Milan in 1881 and depictions of the hard life of cowherds in the Maremma region, a world discovered in 1882 through the hospitality of Principe Corsini, in Venice in 1887. Fattori then took up etching with ever-greater interest and excellent results that won him the gold medal at the World’s Fair of 1900 in Paris. Despite his age, the artist continued to work with the enthusiasm displayed all through his career. 

The theme of urban life addressed by the painter in Viale Principe Amedeo was followed by in-depth studies in the period 1880-82. These depicted small cityscapes occasionally animated by the presence of human beings, animals and wagons, passing through or halted, indifferent to their surroundings even when, as in Sosta alle Cascine (Halt at the Cascine), the road replacing the demolished city walls extends beyond the ancient boundaries of Florence. The vertical support and telescopic perspective, emphasised by the row of saplings, accentuate the impression of the busy confusion of the road lined on one side by modern neo-Renaissance buildings. The bold colours used in the foreground to define the figures of the soldier, the carter and the uncompromisingly sideways donkey and mules with their red blankets stand out against the “extremely delicate, hazy tonalities” of the background, where the burnished hues of the vegetation fade away into the milky sky.¹ 

As regards the pictorial and emotional qualities of the work, whose realism is infused with barely concealed melancholy, Raffaele Monti noted how the “pure compositional simplicity” of the works of the previous decade was combined here with “an almost unprecedented capacity the convey the impression of everyday human squalor through changes in colouring”.² This sign of the evolution of Fattori’s work unquestionably made the painting more valuable in the eyes of sophisticated connoisseurs like Emanuele Rosselli and Mario Taragoni, to whose collections it once belonged. 

Silvestra Bietoletti 

¹ P. D’Ancona, “Raccolta Emanuele Rosselli di Viareggio”, in Galleria Pesaro, Milan, Raccolta Emanuele Rosselli, March 1931, p. 8. 

² Monti 2002, p. 113.