The vertical format accentuates the impression of the narrowness of the street, where the bright summer sunlight penetrates to create bold chiaroscuro effects on the façades of the buildings and illuminate the goods, the crowd and the washing hung out to dry. 

The panel in the collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti could be a sketch for a painting entitled Via degli Speziali a Mercato vecchio (Via degli Speziali at the Old Market), shown by Telemaco Signorini in 1887 at the Società Promotrice exhibition in Florence with a price tag of 150 franchi.¹ The subject can be deduced through comparison with one of the series of eleven etchings produced by the artist in 1886 of the old Florentine market demolished in the redevelopment of the old city centre, which is practically identical to the painting except for a larger proportion of sky.² 

The vertical format accentuates the impression of the narrowness of the street, where the bright summer sunlight penetrates to create bold chiaroscuro effects on the façades of the buildings and illuminate the goods, the crowd and the washing hung out to dry. The studied rhythm of the compositional framework is combined with quick brushstrokes of dense colour that perfectly capture the animation of a street crowded with people as shabby and ugly as the walls of the dilapidated buildings. The careful depiction of the features and poses of the bustling throng, delineated with a few simple but highly significant brushstrokes, is an indispensable complement to the specificity of the place represented in accordance with the approach to the artist’s approach to the urban view, in which the formal character and realism of the images serve to document the reality analytically studied. 

It was probably the initial success of the artist’s views of the market that prompted him to address the subject in a large number of works all through the 1880s, developing formal solutions based on the dynamism of the framing and the precise handling of light and shadow to capture the ramshackle buildings of the neighbourhood and the narrowness of its streets. 

While Tuscan collectors were attracted by these images, which conjured up the bustle of the market and the intensity of its smells so realistically, their Anglo-Saxon counterparts were even more eager. As Signorini was pleased to note in 1883, the twenty canvases “representing subjects drawn from our market” exhibited by the painter and dealer Arthur Lucas in Hanover Square, London, were all sold.³ 

Silvestra Bietoletti 

¹ A. M. Fortuna, “Notes dei viaggi a Londra e a Parigi”, in Bacci 1969, p. 206. 

² Florence 1997, p. 118, no. 83. 

³ Somaré 1926, p. 279.