The sun
Begun in 1903 according to what is documented by a letter from Pellizza to Morbelli, the painting was finished in 1904 and was presented in Munich in 1905. The sun as a regenerating force and symbolic form of nature has been a subject that has long been meditated upon in various preparatory studies. between 1903 and 1905 (The rising of the sun, Ricci collection, Turin. The sun, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Milan. The sun, private collection, Turin). The title originally given by the artist was "Rising Sun", and Pellizza explained how it had to be part of the "Glorifications": as the ancients glorified gods and saints, "we will glorify Nature in its most grandiose spectacles, [..."> the rising sun fascinates and dazzles all of nature, submitting it to its influence ".
(source: ICCD - Central Institute for Catalog and Documentation, Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities)
Writing to his friend Occhini in April 1903, Pellizza outlined the theme of this painting for the first time, specifying that he wanted to choose "eternal subjects", and therefore that he wanted to treat "the beautiful nature that absorbs man and annihilates him in order to camp itself out blazing with its immortal beauty ... You must have already guessed my theme ..."
(Minutari 1903, f. 6, partially transcribed in the Catalog of Giuseppe Pellizza's Manuscripts from the Pellizza heirs donation, Tortona 1974, p. 105)
The intense desire to translate nature's most exciting spectacles onto canvas drove him to climb, even in the middle of the night, the surrounding hills and reach beyond Monleale to Cenelli in the Brada region, to wait, ready in front of his easel, for the dazzling appearance of the sun. As he wrote to Matteo Olivero, he sought to represent nature in its most magnificent spectacles, aiming, rather than to transcend it, to capture its essence with extreme scientific and philosophical rigour. The scientific rigour derived from the desire to translate light with the sum of the colours that compose it according to the analyses of physical science: Divisionist painting had set as one of its hinges of interest and research precisely the achievement of maximum luminosity and Pellizza, an apostle of this technique for more than ten years, felt ready to use it with extreme confidence and mastery. The philosophical rigour was a consequence of the examination of the problems linked to existence that Pellizza had always carried out in conjunction with his painting activity and that had pushed him to move from the external reproduction of reality to the search for the primary values of physical and social existence. The life-giving moment, the passage from darkness to light, was the nodal point of the entire natural world, and painting, after capturing the manifestation of light in objects, had to capture this life-giving moment.
The sun thus appears on the line of the hills with its spherical image coinciding with the maximum white and from which it radiates a dense sequence of strokes that gradually lengthen towards the edges of the canvas, passing from yellow to orange, to violet and green. The glow does not eliminate but rather absorbs and veils the perception of the surrounding nature, of the wide valley in the foreground with its trees and farmsteads whose essential forms can be glimpsed. The critics generally appreciated the work when it was exhibited in Milan at the exhibition celebrating the Simplon tunnel in 1906, held in the Castello Sforzesco, although not everyone grasped the abstract and symbolic value of Pellizzi's vision. For example, the critic of the Bolognese newspaper "L'Avvenire d'Italia", Endymion, underlined that Pellizza had happily overcome with divisionism a pictorial difficulty, previously considered insuperable, that of painting the solar disk, but to conclude that, although the illusion was great, the painting remained of a sterile verism. Ojetti, on the other hand, in the columns of the "Corriere della Sera", stressed that Pellizza "achieves, with his diligent pointillism, a truly astonishing optical effect. But this effect would not be enough to justify the admiration for his work if he did not add to that dazzle in the shady meadows, under the slanting rays of the falling sun (sic! ), such an accurate study of the "values" that everything in his painting comes alive and emanates almost a sweet sadness suffused on the world with that trembling veil of light"; the appreciation therefore extended to the stylistic reading of the whole work in its values and luminous relationships, which we still appreciate today, but which must have been difficult to read even for some careful contemporaries. Pantini himself remarked that the cut of the painting was modest, even though he had shown his appreciation of the rising sun, which appeared to him to be a real "gleam, which for a long time makes your eyes really blink". Similarly, P. De Luca noted the very effective sun coming up, which "leaves, like the real thing, almost an impression in the pupil". Very few tried to go beyond the perceptive value of the work, even if they did not clearly pose the question of symbolism.
This was done in passing by Primo Levi "l'Italico" (1853-1917) who noted in the "Tribuna": "One must finally turn to Pellizza da Volpedo to feel illuminated by a sun that truly seems to be the sun of the future": with this sentence, referring to one of the elements of the iconography linked to the workers' and socialist parties, he grasped that profound sense of regeneration and rebirth of all things that Pellizza had aimed for in reproducing the moment of nature's maximum splendour, making the rising sun, the dawn of a new day, also the dawn of a new century that would be able to know more deeply the mysteries and essence of the universe. The naturalistic motif of the rising sun thus profoundly embodies Pellizza's Symbolist desire.
Writing to Olivero in October 1904, Pellizza in fact remarked:
"The works that I keep in the studio are of two categories: concept and landscape - the first "The Bridge", "Rising Sun", "Love in Life" are "Glorifications" in that I want to present the things represented in their most solemn, most typical and best being",
thus also clearly differentiating The Sun from a material reproduction of reality, from a pure landscape. At the Milan exhibition of 1906, the work was bought by the Ministry for the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome at the price of 2,500 lire. It was the first purchase of Pellizza's works for a public museum: Milan belatedly did justice to the painter who, not undeservedly, had begun to hope for a state purchase as early as 1894 at the Esposizioni Riunite at Castello Sforzesco, with 'On the barn'.
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