This objective but also emotive landscape transports us into a silent, solitary atmosphere pervaded by a light built up on bold contrasts of indigo and yellow. 

The young Giacomo Balla arrived in Rome at the end of the 19^th century and witnessed the rapid transformation of the papal city to the new capital of Italy. The urban fabric grew and changed in character, taking over the suburban areas outside the city gates. For Balla, a tireless observer, all this offered stimuli for new and fascinating visions set above all in the Pinciano district between the tree-lined avenues of Villa Borghese and the modern buildings of his favourite streets. These recurrent routes were interwoven with everyday aspects of the artist’s private life, many years of which were spent in this very neighbourhood, first in the home and studio on Via Piemonte and then on Via Parioli (now Via Paisiello). The pastel depicts a stretch of Via Po, one of the places included within the young artist’s normal radius of a few blocks. “Balla would come to my studio with his eyes all red from staring at the lights and colours of the Fabbrica, on which he was working at the time.”¹ This is how the sculptor Giovanni Prini described the birth of La giornata dell’operaio (Lavorano, mangiano, ritornano) (The Day of the Worker [They Work, Eat, Return]), one of the most fascinating works of the pre-Futurist period, to Balla’s daughter Elica. Produced the same year, the exquisite pastel Via Po also attests to the importance and persistence of the urban landscape as a perceptive and sensitive reflection on the new city rising amidst factories under construction and modern avenues with fine residential buildings, a symbol of the new middleclass inhabitants who were radically transforming the social fabric of Rome. The view shows some buildings typical of the eclectic architecture of the reign of Umberto I, their elegant lines concisely suggested. The quick, fluid brushwork provides an excellent example of Balla’s extremely free interpretation of divisionism in an attempt to capture the vibrations of light and variety of material textures. This objective but also emotive landscape transports us into a silent, solitary atmosphere pervaded by a light built up on bold contrasts of indigo and yellow. The dominant colours are also emphasised in the passe-partout mounting created by the artist, where the repeated lines emphasise the rounded upper edges of the shaped pasteboard, almost like a window looking onto the landscape or a period photo adorned with the classical decorative motifs in fashion at the time. Balla also painted another broader version of the same view from the same angle, which has now been lost but can be seen together with the pastel Via Po in a photo of Balla’s studio taken around 1908 (fig. 1).²

Zelda De Lillo

¹Balla 1984, p. 130.

²Fagiolo dell’Arco 1968, p. 7.