Vision (Abyss) (1895)

Signed lower right Previati.

Provenance: M. Pierre Paradeise collection (1897); Paradeise heirs.

Exhibitions: Civico Ateneo – Ferrara, 1895 (?); Famiglia Artistica – Milan, 1895.

“I have not yet delivered the small picture to the Famiglia Artistica, regretting that I have nothing higher to exhibit to compensate for the little bit of those geese you already know! But how do you do it. 1 With these words, Gaetano Previati wrote to his brother Giuseppe on 3 December 1895 about the painting to be exhibited at the annual Intima exhibition of the Famiglia Artistica in Milan.

The second half of 1895 was a complex period for the painter: the start of the Hoepli competition for the illustrated edition of The Betrothed, the commitment put into the production of the plates and the substantial lack of confidence in the outcome of the competition are often reflected in the intimacy of the letters to his brother where Previati indulges in a pessimistic tone that does not even spare his own works. This complex emotional situation may help to explain the painter’s modest consideration for the small painting with geese to be exhibited at the Intima of 1895, which was judged to be little compared to his own possibilities. The Esposizione Intima of 1895, the exhibition held annually by the Famiglia Artistica, an association of artists of which Previati was a member, opened on 14 December 1895 at the company’s headquarters in Via San Paolo 10, Milan, and closed, somewhat early, on the 26th of the same month precisely to allow the Hoepli competition to be held in the rooms of the association that sponsored the event.

 

Commenting on the review of the Famiglia Artistica, Callofilo, from the pages of the ‘Corriere della Sera’, reported, with an iconographic inaccuracy: ‘by Previati a shepherdess who, surrounded by her sheep, looks at a row of carriages passing across the meadow’.2 The erroneous identification of the subject gave Previati the strength to comment negatively to his brother:

‘You’ve seen from the Corriere how criticism is done – the picture I sent is that sketch that was already in Ferrara – the one of the woman with geese!’3 The subject closely corresponds to that of the painting under examination here, Visione, in which a young girl surrounded by geese watches a row of carriages in the distance. Previati’s note to his brother is also useful because it allows us to know that the painting had already been exhibited in May 1895 at the annual exhibition of the Ateneo Civico in Ferrara.4

“Previati is another poet of the colours of imaginary worlds of fairies, where among cold lunar lights or diffused waves of light, golden, mysterious lyricism – impalpable figures, with impossible shapes.
Previati at the exhibition of the Famiglia Artistica shows us a delightful little painting, a jewel of grace and chromatic finesse’.5 This judgement from the pages of “La Lega Lombarda” contrasted with the little consideration Previati showed for the painting in his communications to his brother. The delicate chromatic orchestration of the work was exalted, above all, and Vittorio Colombo in ‘La Lombardia’ wrote of a ‘Previati with a learned painting’.6 All the art editors, in fact, agreed in their praise of the small painting.

There are, however, two reviews that allow us to identify the painting with certainty and to appreciate some of its less obvious aspects.

Again in ‘La Lega Lombarda’, the editor, in his first article on the exhibition, noted: ‘Previati with the title Abissi exhibits a small painting of great feeling – on the front plane a peasant woman followed by geese observes from afar the rich crews passing on the road’.7 The pen of

‘L’Italia del Popolo’, Carlo Bozzi, wrote: ‘Previati has a small scene that, as a social contrast, would touch the borders of the banal if the refined artistic unreality did not make it instead a lofty vision’.8

The small painting, therefore, was perceived by the critics, and it was a reading motivated and supported by the original title Abissi (Abysses), as a work connoted by a vague social intonation: the small scene in the foreground with the goose-keeper contrasts with the parade of rich modern carriages in the background, emphasising those abysses that irretrievably distance the two worlds. If the critics’ notation of the weakness of this iconography is understandable – consider that this is the moment in Milan when the most bluntly and harshly social tendencies in agreement with the Divisionist declination in some of Emilio Longoni’s masterpieces find full expression – nevertheless Bozzi pointed out how the reading of the work could not stop at this iconographic level and emphasised how Previati’s learned painting managed to transform a subject even banal, into a lofty vision marked by that chrism of unreality that characterised Previati’s manner. The exhibition of the small canvas was therefore an unexpected success: despite its modest size and the little that it represented in terms of production, the critics grasped its most significant aspects of chromatic intonation and evocative power.

The backlighting of the scene with the golden light that imbues every detail, the unreal suspension of space and time, the dreamy figure of the guardian who, in some respects, rather than looking seems to produce the vision, eliminate all episodicity and transform the scene into a vision akin to those fired in the same turn of the year such as the famous Journey into the Azure recalled precisely in the idea of the parade of carriages in the background.

The same pictorial draftsmanship, which recovers the rapidity of touch of Scapigliate ancestry, contributes to the exaltation of these visionary values: the figures are dazzled by luminous flashes, the volumes are nimbly described by a few strokes and outlined without conceding to the calligraphic meticulousness of an overly exhibited filamentous ductus, the meadow is summarily described by masses and enlivened by a delicate orchestration of vertical strokes of different tones that give back the sensation of luminous vibration. The crews in the background, as they move from left to right, lose consistency – impalpable in their impossible shapes – almost as if the light devours their materiality until they merge with the horizon inflamed by the sunset. The entire composition is played out on an extreme economy of means and spatially dominated by the flight outwards emphasised by the two main directions: the horizon with the crew and the lane on which the guardian stands guide the eye of the observer in a fast trajectory that lets the scene continue ‘outside’ the edge of the painting and, in this way, emphasise the extreme rapidity of the vision and the speed of the gait of the horses and carriages.

These stylistic features are highlighted by Previati himself in the letters relating to the sale of the painting by the Parisian collector and amateur Pierre Paradeise.

In the first communication, dated 30 December 1896, Previati writes:

Of the approximate size of 20×40 in oil-painted things I would have two subjects, one depicting a young goose-keeper dreamily watching a parade of carriages returning from the races. A scene illuminated by the setting sun, which I have entitled Vision.

The frame measures, barring an error, 30×42. The painting is much more than a sketch but cannot be said to be finished as is generally intended.

In addition to the specific notation about the carriages returning from the races that leads the crew in the background back to a thematic modernity – that of the mundane event of horse racing – which explains the original interpretation of the painting in a social key, Previati provides two useful indications.

The first concerns the stylistic characteristic: much more than a sketch, but not a commonly understood finished work. These aspects are evident in the small canvas, which, as we have said, betrays an agile invoice, only apparently cursive, but the result of a very precise linguistic choice, all the more so since, as can be deduced from the letter to his brother of December 1895, the painting was not a chance picture made in the run-up to the Famiglia Artistica exhibition, but a work that had already been completed, exhibited in Ferrara, and to the finishing of which, also in relation to the frame, Previati had devoted himself before the exhibition. Previati himself, moreover, had already explained to his brother how this type of painting responded to his personal vision on the occasion of the exhibition, again at the Famiglia Artistica in 1892, of the large Adoration of the Magi (Tortona, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio), characterised by the same sketchy appearance. The painter noted how the most hostile critics showed ‘the same fearful concession to the ideality of the concept, the same reluctance to accept the form, although the sense of realism is here more accentuated and the pictorial effect violated by the rapidity of the sketch’. 9 Despite the diversity of the subject, Visione responded to the same intention of a greater balance between ideality and realism supported, in both senses, by a cursive painting capable of emphasising the idealistic component in the refinement of the luministic and chromatic plays, on the one hand, and of avoiding the excessive pictorial effect of plastic rarefaction, often lamented by critics as an indicator of a lack of drawing strength, on the other, thanks to the greater conciseness of the sketch.

A second element that emerges from Previati’s note is that of the title: the previous Abissi, which carried with it an inevitable social connotation, is replaced by a less constraining Visione, which frees the subject from any anecdotal element and transforms it into a scene with a more varied evocativeness. If we consider that in 1894 Emilio Longoni exhibited a socialist manifesto at the Milan Triennale such as Riflessioni di un affamato (Reflections of a Hungry Man) – known under the title of Contrasti sociali (Social Contrasts) and centred on the same dichotomy between the figure of an underprivileged man observing, beyond a shop window a bourgeois couple lunching at a restaurant table – it seems understandable how the repetition of the same dynamic – guardian versus bourgeois returning from the horse races – could be perceived by critics as referable to the same social dimension although sustained and transfigured by the refined unreality of Previatian conception.

The documentation accompanying the work makes it possible to reconstruct precisely how the painting passed through the collation of Pierre Paradeise, a Parisian entrepreneur in the clothing industry, and an amateur and collector of contemporary art.

The sale with Paradeise began in December 1896: most likely, the buyer must have known Previati in Italy. From the first available communication of 30 December 1896, it is clear that relations must have already been structured: the painter offered the collector a choice between two works and, following the preference for Visione, the painting was sold for 300 lire and sent to Paris on 29 January 1897 – see Previati’s certification of 9 February 1897 – and since then the painting has remained in the Parisian collection, remaining substantially unknown to the studio.

That Previati’s opinion of the painting as a pochino did not correspond to the truth is testified not only by the widely favourable critical notes already mentioned, but also by the affair of La Guardiana delle oche. If the canvas in the Paradeise collection was not known, in fact, the censuses of Previati’s work report a second version of the painting catalogued in the Archives of Divisionism10 as being part of the Edison Company’s collection and, subsequently, sold at auction in the estate sale. The canvas, exhibited at the historic exhibitions La donna nell’arte da Hayez a Modigliani (Milan, 1953) and Pittori lombardi del secondo Ottocento (Como, 1954), had entered Edison’s collections following the first dispersal at auction of an important Milanese art collection, that of Germano Benzoni, a great collector of Previati’s work. In the auction held by the Scopinich Gallery in Milan, a painting entitled La guardiana delle oche (The Goose-keeper) was offered for sale and the reproduction of the canvas confirms that it was the one that subsequently entered the Edison collection.11

In the face, therefore, of a modest opinion of the work by the author himself, the presence of a second version of the canvas confirms that, in reality, the work certainly had to convince Previati to the point of almost palpably replicating the subject.

Compared to the Paradeise version, in fact, the already Benzoni canvas differs in a number of secondary elements: the larger size of the canvas allows for a more airy development of the sky and a more paused scanning of the theory of carriages, while the main group of the guardian remains substantially unchanged with the exception of the number of geese, which increases by two, from eight to ten. Pictorially, the Benzoni version, while retaining that characteristic sketch-like conciseness, is more refined: this is particularly evident in the figure of the maiden and in the secondary details of her anatomy and dress. From the threads of the corset to the arms to the highlights on the profile, the painting appears more precise and meditated although, as mentioned, Previati voluntarily adopts a ductus that is only apparently fast that is, in reality, the result of a very precise linguistic choice devoted to that coexistence of ideality and realism that gives the scene the character of vision. Were it not so, in fact, the existence of two versions characterised by the same sketch-like appearance would be difficult to justify.

It therefore remains to be clarified which of the two versions, whether the one considered here already Paradeise or the one already Benzoni, is to be recognised in the prototype exhibited at the Famiglia Artistica in 1895.

The letters exchanged between Previati and the French collector on the occasion of the purchase of the painting help to untangle the knot.

In the letter of 30 December 1896, in fact, Previati offered the collector a double choice: the oil paintings available – and it is likely that Paradeise had also asked for the paintings to correspond to an average size of 30×40 cm – were Vision and The House of the Virgin, proposed at 500 lire, which, the painter wrote, measured 25×42 cm and was characterised by the same ‘scapigliata’ style of execution. Paradeise bought, as mentioned, Visione.

The House of the Virgin, on the other hand, became part of the Benzoni collection: in fact, the Scopinich auction catalogue of the collection’s auction shows, at number 8712, precisely the painting with a sacred theme that corresponds perfectly in size – 42×27 cm – and was put up for auction at the subsequent auction of the Benzoni heirs’ collection in 1932. The fact that both canvases offered at Paradeise were found in the Ambrosian collector’s collection leads one to believe that following the sale of the first version to the French buyer, Previati produced a second one, almost identical except for small variants, and that this one then found a market in Milan. It is difficult to say whether this was an explicit request from a client or an autonomously elaborated replica by the painter.

There is no evidence that the canvas exhibited at the Famiglia Artistica was sold at the exhibition in December 1895: indeed, we learn from Previati’s letters that sales at the exhibition were practically nil13 and in the subsequent correspondence for the year 1896, which stops in November, there is no mention of a sale of the painting. It is therefore possible to state that, in all likelihood, the Abissi exhibited in 1895 had not been sold until November 1896 and that, therefore, there was no need for Previati to replicate the subject. Moreover, in his communication to Paradeise, the painter spoke of paintings that had already been completed and were immediately available, not of replicas or works that had to be created ex novo.

It therefore seems highly probable that Previati decided to produce a replica of the canvas following the sale: it was probably the deal with Paradeise that convinced the painter of the commercial attractiveness of the small canvas, prompting him to produce a second version, as, moreover, frequently happens with other works by the artist.

A comparison of the two canvases also seems to confirm the precedence of the Paradeise version, to be identified therefore in the Abissi exhibited in 1895 in Ferrara and Milan, over the Benzoni version: the slight iconographic changes that balance the full-empty relationship in the group of geese in a different way, the subtle but evident change in scale between the geese and the human figure that makes the dimensional relationship more balanced, the more paused rhythm of the carriages due to the transfer to a slightly larger format of the scene, the greater accuracy of certain details already noted, are differences that clearly indicate the second reworking of the subject in the Benzoni version.

 

These events clarify how the painter’s original position in considering the painting to be a little bit of a joke had to change decisively: the favourable critical reception at the 1895 exhibition and the fairly swift sale of the piece a year later, must have been a reassurance both on the goodness of the iconographic conception and on the expressive mode entrusted to a painting that was different from what is generally understood and played on a sprezzatura of touch capable of exalting the evocative power of colour and light.

Niccolò D’Agati

1 S. Asciamprener, Gaetano Previati. Lettere al fratello, Hoepli, Milan 1946, p. 229.

2 Callofilo, Tre Esposizioncine, ‘Corriere della Sera’, XX (1895), no. 349, 20 December 1895, p. 3

3 Asciamprener 1946, p. 240.

4 Unfortunately, the lack of catalogues does not allow us to further verify the presence of the work at the University of Ferrara in 1895, which, however, seems certain from Previati’s words. In any case, it is not a question of the earlier editions because, from the letters available for the years 1893 and 1894, it is possible to deduce the exact amount of what the painter sent to Ferrara and exclude the sending of this canvas. The correspondence for 1895 reported by Asciamprener unfortunately does not cover the months of the Ferrara exhibition.

5 A.z.c., Alla Famiglia Artistica, ‘La Lega Lombarda’, X (1895), 346, 28-29 December 1895, pp. 2-3.

6 Pvc, L’Esposizionetta alla Famiglia Artistica, ‘La Lombardia’, XXXVII (1895), no. 344, 16 December 1895, p. 3.

7 L’esposizione annuale della Famiglia Artistica, ‘La Lega Lombarda’, X (1895), 337, 18-19 December 1895, p. 3.

8 C.b., L’Esposizione alla Famiglia Artistica, ‘L’Italia del Popolo’, VII (1895), 1996, 23-24 December 1895, p. 2.

9 Asciamprenere 1946, p. 124.

10 T. Fiori, ed., Archivi del Divisionismo, II, Officina edizioni, Rome 1968, III.404, no. 828.

11 ‘Previati Gaetano. La guardiana delle oche. Oil painting on canvas. Work executed around 1890. Dimensions 50×35 cm. Carved and gilded wooden frame’, in Raccolta Benzoni, Exhibition and Auction Sale. December 1926.

Scopinich Gallery, Rizzoli, Milan 1926, p. 38 no. 88 table LIV.

12 Raccolta Benzoni, Esposizione e Vendita all’Asta. December 1926. Scopinich Gallery, Rizzoli, Milan 1926, p. 38 no. 87 table XLIX.

13 Asciamprener 1946, p. 236.