Spring idyll
The Volpedo exhibition has as its central fulcrum a "rediscovered" masterpiece by Pellizza, woven by sophisticated relationships of light, backlight and subtle iridescences: it is Spring Idyll, a work conceived and begun by the painter in 1896. Writing to his friend Casciaro in fact, on October 3, 1896, declared: "I have four sketched works of three I have already spoken to you the last sketch a few days ago is an Idyll that if I can finish next spring I will send to the Venetian exhibition": Pellizza identified in falling asleep in autumn the first moment of nature, inspiring the work that would later find, in the spring regeneration, harmonies and lights to be translated on the canvas with a "less showy" and more refined pointillism than that previously practiced in works such as Sul barn and which had for a long time engaged in the rebalancing of the dominant blue and bluish intonations.
The canvas, which in Pellizza's projects was intended as the first of a series dedicated to developing the theme of the Idylls, occupied the painter above all in 1899 but was only completed in 1901, when the planned cycle had given way to a more complex program of pictorial sequences intended to celebrate Love, within which the canvas was part of, constituting the first panel, but also Life, Work, Motherhood, Death. For these works the painter had prefigured general compositional schemes that alternated shapes in the round, in square, in rectangle, thinking of possible multiple mixes of themes and subjects. A complex project that had forced him to set up several canvases at the same time that required long execution times and that only in some cases were completed.
Spring idyll although completed in 1901 did not leave Volpedo's studio until 1903 when the painter sent it to the fifth Venice Biennale; with this work he intended to underline his quality as a symbolist painter, confirming the tendencies made explicit at the III biennial of 1899 with Self-portrait (now Florence, Uffizi Gallery), but no longer insisting on the symbolic value of specific objects, and instead focusing on a evocation of meanings capable of transcending the materiality of nature above all through the concatenation of compositional rhythms, chromatic harmonies and luminous and iridescent suggestions.
It also seemed a turning point with respect to the Fourth Estate which had sparked lively discussions at the First Quadrennial of Turin in 1902; but, in fact, the Idyll sent to Venice was not so far from the other work that the painter had sent to Turin, the beautiful Sunset, now better known under the title Il roveto (Piacenza, Galleria Ricci Oddi): a pure landscape in a pulsating backlight that seems to evoke the vitality and regenerative force of nature through an effective search for luminous effects of backlighting and transparent shadows, a vision resulting from the profound need to recover the organic and organicistic bond with nature that was one of the ways in which international symbolism was expressed.
The symbolist and decorative value of Spring Idyll prompted Pellizza to send the work the following year to the Glaspalast in Munich - in transalpine environments which, from Bocklin to von Marées to Hildebrandt, had not been insensitive to the symbolist lesson of Puvis de Chavannes - , and later in 1905 in Angers together with a sequence of beautiful landscapes but also with The mirror of life (Turin GAM) and The procession (Milan Museum of Science and Technology), and then in Rome, for the annual Exhibition of the Society Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts in 1906. Here the canvas was sold, with the direct involvement of the painter - then in Rome for some time and engaged in elaborating some landscapes in Villa Borghese - to a merchant from Amsterdam and, from Holland, to an unspecified date passed in the United Kingdom and took up residence in an English collection. The sale caused the Italian critics and collectors to lose track of the painting who, however, continued to be familiar with the image of the painting through a second similar work that was exhibited, with the title Idillio campestre in the meadows of the parish church of Volpedo at the "Mostra individual by G. Pellizza da Volpedo ”at the Pesaro Gallery in Milan in the first two months of 1920, then entering the Civic Art Collections of Milan. It was probably Vittore Grubicy who, writing to Guido Marangoni, superintendent of the Castello Sforzesco, in 1919, referred to the painting indicating it as "The girotondo", to suggest the more concise title which then remained common from the early 1920s also in the inventories of the Gallery. The reappearance of Spring Idyll on the international art market in 1980 suddenly brought attention back to this singular double Pellizzian work, posing various questions about the nature and motivations of the execution of the Girotondo.
[Text by Aurora Scotti, taken from Luce, backlight, iridescences. Pellizza and his Divisionist friends, Tortona-Volpedo 2007, exhibition catalog, 2 September - 21 October 2007">
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