Portrait of Yole Biaggini Moschini (1901)

Inscriptions: signed and dated lower left ‘V. Corcos / Stra 1901’.

Bibliography: V. Moschini, Per Yole Moschini Biaggini. Nel primo anniversario della morte / 21 ottobre 1906, Bergamo 1906, table p. I; P. Nardi (ed.), Tutte le opere di Antonio Fogazzaro, Milan 1938, p. 481; D. Durbè (ed.), Mostra di Vittorio Corcos, Livorno 1965, table 46; D. Piccioni, L. Piccioni, Antonio Fogazzaro, Turin 1970, p. 176 (table outside text); I. Taddei, Vittorio Matteo Corcos: tra affetti domestici e sentimenti segreti, atmosfere quotidiane e riti mondani, in F. Mazzocca, C. Sisi, I. Taddei (eds.), Corcos: i sogni della Belle Époque, Venice 2014, p. 35, p. 21, footnote 66 (see also P. Segramora Rivolta’s file on p. 203, n. 88).

Exhibitions: ‘Vittorio Corcos Exhibition’, Livorno, Villa Fabbricotti, 31 July – 31 August 1965.

Re-emerging almost sixty years after the last exhibition, this painting is to be considered one of the most representative examples of commissioned portraits painted by Vittorio Matteo Corcos at the height of his long and prolific career as a portraitist of high society. The canvas, when it still belonged to the heirs of the portraitist, was last exhibited in 1965 in Livorno, on the occasion of the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the Tuscan master, aimed at rekindling critical interest after a long period of oblivion. The work depicts Yole Biaggini Moschini, one of the most influential personalities of the Veneto elite in the late 19th and early 20th century. The wife of Vittorio Moschini, mayor of Padua from 1900 to 1904 and deputy of the Kingdom of Italy until 1913, the elegant lady was a prominent figure on the cultural scene of the time, and welcomed leading artists and men of letters1 into her salon, among whom Antonio Fogazzaro stands out in particular. The writer, when he
met her for the first time in 1887 in San Bernardino, described her in a letter to Felicitas Buchner as a woman of extraordinary charm and intelligence, capable of enchanting anyone who met her: ‘There is a very seductive young lady here, with whom one spends a few hours every day. She is very beautiful, very elegant, full of wit […] She told me herself that she was judged by some to be a siren, a charmer, but that they were wrong… ‘2 As is well known, she is the inspiration for the character of the seductive Jeanne Dessalle in the novels Piccolo mondo moderno and Il Santo, part of the “Maironi tetralogy” that also includes Piccolo mondo antico and Leila. Their intense friendship, testified by a dense correspondence3 , inevitably aroused some murmurings, especially when, after her untimely death in 1905, Fogazzaro dedicated his poem Nel cimitero di Padova to her, with verses steeped in affection and regret: ‘Troppo indegno a me stesso si scoverse / Nello sguardo di lei l’occulto mio, / L’occulto che il mio labbro non le aperse, / Ch’ella non seppe, che sol vede Iddio’. Among the most pungent criticisms was that of Ugo Ojetti, who, under the pseudonym ‘Count Ottavio’, ironised the writer’s behaviour in the columns of the ‘Illustrazione Italiana’, considered bizarre for his choice to go to the cemetery at night to mourn the deceased4. Ojetti himself knew the lady personally, whom he described, not without a sarcastic accent, in his autobiographical memoirs: ‘She was a good lady, dark-haired, tall and slender, with a long neck and long legs, with too many veils and too long that acted as her wings, with too many and too rapid readings that acted as her tail and which she would languidly wave at you at the first opportunity. Blessed be the province, and blessed be literature. All it took was a touch of irony to make Signora Jole simple and balanced again in an instant, with a good sense of the Veneto and wit, with such a frank and calm laugh that you would have said she had taken off her melodramatic armour and happily relaxed and rested at last in her everyday clothes.
In March 1901 – the year Piccolo mondo moderno was published by Hoepli – Yole Biaggini Moschini stayed in Florence, where she met Corcos. On that occasion, the artist made her first small portrait, depicting her standing, full-length, in a walking suit6. It was probably as part of that meeting that she commissioned Corcos to paint the large portrait on round canvas that is presented here. To paint it, as documented by the handwritten inscription next to the signature and date in the bottom left-hand corner, the painter went to Stra, to the luxurious villa where the Moschini couple resided. The portrait shows her wrapped in an elegant white dress, with her right shoulder sensually uncovered: with her left hand she holds a necklace with a long string of white pearls, echoed in her hairstyle, while with the other she holds a bunch of small flowers, also white. The artist thus elaborates a true harmony of whites and soft variations of pink, where the tones of the woman’s diaphanous complexion blend with the large satin drape in the background. Such chromatic solutions reveal Corcos’ profound knowledge of the European portrait trends of the time, influenced by the English school and in particular by James Whistler, John Singer Sargent and John Lavery, whose portraits exalted feminine grace through refined harmonies of a few colours. Although he was not an assiduous exhibitor, preferring rather to work in a private sphere at the service of elite patrons, Corcos was well informed about developments in contemporary portraiture, also thanks to his frequent stays abroad: from Paris, where he lived permanently from 1880 to 1886, to Edinburgh, London and Berlin. Although he preferred portraiture that was faithful to reality, so much so that it sometimes bordered on the oleographic, the Tuscan painter was able to fully embody the ideals of Art Nouveau aesthetics. One can see, in the portrait under examination, the fluctuating veils that envelop the effigy, which the early twentieth-century figuration took from painting at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular reference to Van Dyck.

1 Among the first in-depth studies of Yole Biaggini Moschini’s role, see A. Finco, Una donna fogazzariana: Yole Moschini-Biaggini, in ‘The South Central Bulletin’, 1973, pp. 197-199.
2 D. Piccioni, L. Piccioni, Antonio Fogazzaro, Turin 1970, p. 344.
3 V. Bertoldo, P. Luxardo (eds.), Antonio Fogazzaro, Yole Biaggini Moschini: carteggio (1887-1909), Vicenza 2011.4 See Piccioni-Piccioni 1970, cit., p. 349.
5 U. Ojetti, Cose viste, Florence 1943, vol. II, pp. 313-314.
6 Cf. P. Segramora Rivolta, card of the work, in C. Sisi, I. Taddei (eds.), Corcos: i sogni della Belle Époque, Venice 2014, vol. 203, no. 88.