Antonio Fontanesi, the last romantic. And his legacy from Pellizza da Volpedo to Burri

by Ilaria Baratta , published on 09/06/2019
Categories: Exhibition reviews / Disclaimer

An artist endowed with a strong painterly, at times poetic, sensibility, Antonio Fontanesi (Reggio Emilia, 1818 - Turin, 1882) spent the last years of his life in total discouragement, following thenegative outcome, or rather, a real rejection he suffered at the presentation of one of his last and most ambitious paintings, The Clouds, at the1880 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Turin. The large painting did not receive even the slightest consideration from the jury, which was evidently either unaware of or unappreciative of the changes that landscape painting had undergone in more recent times. The work highlighted the highly poetic trait with which the artist had depicted nature and the artistic influences of tradition, beginning with the classical and ideal landscape of the seventeenth-century Claude Lorrain (Chamagne, 1600 - Rome, 1682) and ending with the Dutch landscape and finally that of English Romanticism.

The exhibition Antonio Fontanesi and His Legacy, which the Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia is dedicating to Antonio Fontanesi on the 200th anniversary of his birth until July 14, 2019, takes its starting point precisely from this painting, unjustly overlooked, witnessing the “darkest hour” of his production, between 1880 and 1882.

Clouds dates from 1880 and depicts “a great sky and an immense plain,” according to Fontanesi himself: references to transalpine landscape painting, in particular to Corot (Paris, 1796 - 1875) and Poussin (Les Andelys, 1594 - Rome, 1665), and to Constable (East Bergholt, 1776 - London, 1837) are evident here, especially in terms of the close-to-real light, the color combinations and the materiality of color. Next to this large canvas was placed one of the many sketches the artist executed for The Clouds, both works housed at the GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. Characteristic of his way of painting was in fact the habit of drawing impressions from life, in direct contact with nature, which were later rethought and remodeled, even in the subjects, in the tranquility of his studio, usually with larger dimensions. A kind of William Wordsworth’s "emotion recollected in tranquility." The setting of the two works appears essentially mirror-like: the position of trees and houses is reversed; in the final work, human and animal figures are distinct, but in both works the protagonist clouds reveal their full-bodiedness and dominate the pleasant landscape below.

Hall of the exhibition Antonio Fontanesi and his legacy in Reggio Emilia, Palazzo dei Musei

Hall of the exhibition Antonio Fontanesi and his legacy in Reggio Emilia, Palazzo dei Musei

Hall of the exhibition Antonio Fontanesi and his legacy in Reggio Emilia, Palazzo dei Musei

Antonio Fontanesi, The Clouds (1880; oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Antonio Fontanesi, Study for The Clouds (1879-1880; oil on cardboard, 51.7 x 75 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

From this first passage, the Reggio Emilia exhibition deliberately recreated, in an egregious and intelligent way, that room which, nineteen years after the artist’s death, restored Fontanesi’s glory: the turning point that marked true recognition by critics and the Italian and foreign public in fact occurred in 1901 with the Reggio Emilia painter’s posthumous participation in the Fourth International Art Exhibition in Venice, even though it was a retrospective on a now unknown artist and not an exhibition intended to pay homage to him through his most appreciated works. Proponents of this decisive step were his most loyal admirers, who never abandoned him, especially after his death. First among them was Marco Calderini of Turin, who, since 1886, had planned and been responsible for writing the master’s biography, which was later published in the very year of the turning point. The Venetian Fontanesian retrospective was set up in the hall of honor dedicated to Umberto I and Margherita di Savoia, and Marco Calderini, who had been entrusted with the task of ordering the room, wanted to exhibit sixty-eight works, including paintings, drawings and studies. As mentioned, the exhibition managed to reunite again some of the leading works of that 1901 room, the most representative of his high quality production: Morning and The Quiet from the GAM in Turin, Campagna con gregge, from the Uffizi; Bufera imminente from the Giorgio Zamboni collection in Reggio Emilia; Solitude, Entrance to a Temple in Japan and Marina in burrasca preserved in the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia. Also, The Trough from the Pinacoteca in Bologna, At the Fountain from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and Altacomba from Aosta. These are all landscape-themed works, for the most part where the subjects are cast in the midst of wooded or rural nature; works that reflect the expression coined by Fontanesi himself: "the poetry of truth," to indicate the mixture of a Romantic sensibility capable of providing his canvases with a lyrical stroke and light that are unparalleled and a fidelity to truth documented by study in the open air.

In L’Abbeveratoio, in Campagna con gregge and in Bufera imminente, to be dropped into nature are cows that, in the shade of the foliage, stroll, cool off in a small pool of water or eat grass in the meadows: situations of calm and tranquility that welcome the viewer by profounding those sensations; Bufera imminente, however, infuses a sense of suspension and dramatic concentration through the two cows in the foreground, in a stillness that precedes the storm. A stormy situation is replayed in Marina in the Gale: here the tones become darker and earthier, the sails bend from the wind, the sea ripples, dark clouds advance impetuously, and, thanks to the suggestive effects of backlighting, everything is charged with a strong expressiveness. The other paintings mentioned, such as The Morning, The Stillness, Altacomba, At the Fountain, again present a nature that conveys serenity, just as serene are the people depicted within these: sunny landscapes or shaded by vegetation with frequent presence of thewater element, with which the subjects interact, also re-proposing the theme of the maiden at the fountain. Case in point is Solitude: here a girl is depicted sitting in the center of the scene absorbed in her thoughts; it is a painting that conveys to the viewer a certain melancholy, but it is undoubtedly representative of the poetic sense that the artist gives to his paintings. Paintings that evoke states of mind, as was the intent of the artist himself.

In addition, they are works that testify to an innovative approach with respect to the time: Morning is influenced by the research of the French landscape painters, in particular it refers to the painting preserved at the Musée d’Orsay by Constant Troyon (Sèvres, 1810 - Paris, 1865), Boeufs allant au labor: effet de matin, especially for the intense backlighting effect, formal purity and compositional balance. Quietness has elements in common with Corot ’s art both in its refined lyricism and in the reprise of the motif of the standing figure intent on bending the branches of the tree, as an element of conjunction between heaven and earth. The trough, on the other hand, was influenced by the study from English landscape painters, particularly the light effects of the Romantics, such as William Turner (London, 1775 - Chelsea, 1851) and Constable, while Bufera imminente was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch painting and French and English landscape painting.

Antonio Fontanesi, The Morning (1855-1858; oil on paper applied to cardboard, 20.1 x 31.1 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Antonio Fontanesi, The Stillness (ca. 1860; oil on canvas, 81.5 x 119 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Antonio Fontanesi, The Trough (c. 1867; oil on canvas, 112 x 134 cm; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale)

Antonio Fontanesi, Campagna con gregge (1867-1868; oil on canvas, 151 x 192 cm; Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Palatina Gallery, Palazzo Pitti)

Antonio Fontanesi, At the Fountain (1867-1869; oil on canvas, 103 x 78 cm; Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Antonio Fontanesi, Impending Storm (1874; oil on canvas, 102 x 141 cm; Reggio Emilia, Giorgio Zamboni Collection)

Antonio Fontanesi, Solitude (1875; oil on canvas, 115 x 150 cm; Reggio Emilia, Musei Civici)

Antonio Fontanesi, Entrance to a Temple in Japan (1878-1880; chiaroscuro preparation on canvas, 114 x 145 cm; Reggio Emilia, Musei Civici)

Antonio Fontanesi, Marina in a Gale (1878-1880; oil on canvas, 80 x 110 cm; Reggio Emilia, Musei Civici)

The idea of holding a retrospective devoted to Fontanesi almost twenty years after his death was well received by Antonio Fradeletto, secretary general of the Venice Exposition since its first edition, thanks to a kind of coincidence: the French wished to present in their hall paintings from Alexander Young’s private collection, which included many masterpieces of theÉcole de Barbizon, a school developed in France that proposed itself as a landscape current of realism. Exponents of the latter were Corot, Troyon, and Daubigny (Paris, 1817 - 1878), with whom Fontanesi had had direct relations of esteem and friendship: the project was therefore optimal and won great praise, causing the public to rediscover one of the most significant Italian painters in the landscape sphere of the 19th century. Thanks to the Venetian retrospective and the publication of the biography of the Reggio Emilia master, Fontanesi received that long-awaited reconsideration, evidenced by a statement by the poet and writer Giovanni Cena: “Twenty years have passed since his death. Fontanesi’s dawn is now dawning.”

The following sections offer an overview of Fontanesi’s critical fortune after his death: between 1892 and 1915 the Divisionists saw in him one of their forerunners, in 1924 Carlo Carrà (Quargnento, 1881 - Milan, 1966) proposed a reinterpretation of the artist in the monograph dedicated to him, without forgetting the Novecento Group ’s esteem for the painter, and finally between 1952 and 1954 Fontanesi was the subject of study and critical readings by Roberto Longhi and Francesco Arcangeli. Therefore, the visitor experiences the present exhibition in Reggio Emilia in a crescendo of praise and positive judgments towards the artist, even though he himself could not have had a way of knowing them, since they were posthumous. Inevitable in this regard is a reflection on the sad consequences of a critique, which in this case caused great distress to the painter in the very last years of his existence. An artist who transferred his sensitive soul to canvas and who, after his disappearance and despite the consideration he enjoyed in the happiest periods of his career, was totally forgotten for years, but who managed to redeem himself only after his death (thus never coming to his attention) thanks to a group of loyal friends and admirers.

A first step toward interest in his art occurred in 1892, in conjunction with theRetrospective Exhibition of the Turin Promotrice, where sixty-eight of his works, including drawings and paintings, were exhibited. It was Leonardo Bistolfi (Casale Monferrato, 1859 - La Loggia, 1933) who was directly responsible for the organization of the Retrospective, the author of the bronze bust of Fontanesi, displayed in the first room of the present exhibition, made in 1883 and now kept in the Pinacoteca dell’Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti. Regarding the Retrospective of 1892, there are records of visits by Vittore GrubicydeDragon (Milan, 1851 - Milan, 1920), Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (Volpedo, 1868 - 1907) and Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria, 1853 - Milan, 1919), who were literally called to the call by Bistolfi himself: “I wish you all to come and see Fontanesi!” These, deeply enthusiastic about the Turin retrospective, recognized in the master a forerunner of their way of painting, that is, of divisionism; moreover they saw represented in his art a new conception of landscape, according to which a state of mind was depicted in his paintings. In particular, Pellizza da Volpedo recognized himself in the master’s art and wrote in a letter addressed to Morbelli, “some small landscapes are those that most satisfy my painting aspirations. Later I will be more of a landscape painter. Fontanesi helps me to find myself; that I am nothing but a solitary lover of the virgin wilderness diffused in light.” Significantly obvious is the proposed comparison between Fontanesi’s painting entitled Novembre, dated 1864, and Pellizza da Volpedo’s I due pastori nel prato di Mongini (November) , painted in 1901. It was no coincidence that Pellizza da Volpedo had pinned the motif of Novembre to his Turin retrospective catalog. Common in both is the theme of children immersed in the silence of nature, similarly present in Solitude. The protagonist of these canvases, however, is the emanation of light over the entire painting, which makes the strokes of color stand out. Grubicy saw in Fontanesi the exemplification of his reflections on the creative process: the suggestion felt in front of a landscape involved, according to him, both the creative phase of the artist and the moment of reception by the public, who, observing the work, would evoke the impressions felt by the painter. Angelo Morbelli’s painting titled Sunday Sunrise deserves a mention: here, too, the subjects, as in Fontanesi, are immersed in nature, conveying a kind of mysticism; presumably the figures are silently walking towards the village to attend Sunday mass. This section brings together masterpieces that instill a sense of peace; they are masterpieces of silence.

Antonio Fontanesi, Novembre (1864; oil on canvas, 103 x 153 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Winter (1898; oil on canvas, 47.1 x 39.5 cm; Venice, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro)

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, I due pastori nel prato di Mongini (November) (1901; oil on canvas, 45.3 x 62.2 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Angelo Morbelli, Sunday Sunrise (1915; oil on canvas, 78 x 132 cm; Piacenza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi)

The next section bears the evocative title of Number, Order, Measure: terms representative of the 1920s, placed by Gino Severini (Cortona, 1883 - Paris, 1966) in the exergue to the volume Du cubisme au classicisme, later used by Felice Casorati (Novara, 1883 - Turin, 1963) to define his art and which Carlo Carrà saw fit for his illustrated monograph dedicated to Fontanesi, published in 1924. Thus opened a new season of rediscovery of the Reggio Emilia artist that propagated from the 1920s to the 1930s. Inspiring these reflections are paintings such as Il mulino (The Mill), painted by Fontanesi between 1858 and 1859, influenced by Daubigny’s lesson: it would be Carrà above all who would take up the compositional scheme of this painting, clearly evident in Capanni sul mare (1927) and in Pagliai (1929), where in both we see solitary buildings immersed in a landscape, in the first case on the beach of Forte dei Marmi and in the second in a countryside. In Casorati’s Tuscan Landscape , the cottages illuminated by sunlight are scattered among the crops on the hills, rereading nineteenth-century Vedutism from a contemporary perspective. Arturo Tosi (Busto Arsizio, 1871-Milan, 1956) is here as a collector of Fontanesi’s works: among the works in his collection is one of the versions of Solitude, which was given on loan in 1926 to the Exhibition of Tuscan Macchiaioli and Piedmontese landscape painters.

Margherita Sarfatti also wrote about Fontanesi in Popolo d’Italia in 1922, calling him “one of those providential men that nature occasionally creates, and society perfects so that they serve as a bridge, as a link with the next lineage, with the new generation. His legacy, the fruit of a wandering life, nourished by passions, encounters and many cities (Geneva, Paris, London, Turin, Tokyo), is a prolific inheritance, the outcome of a fruitful journey: the Emilian artist like the bee carried the pollen.”

Antonio Fontanesi, The Mill (1858-1859; oil on canvas, 46.3 x 57.4 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Carlo Carrà, Huts by the Sea (1927; oil on canvas applied to cardboard, 44 x 63 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Carlo Carrà, Pagliai (1929; oil on canvas, 69 x 90 cm; Piacenza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi)

Felice Casorati, Tuscan Landscape (c. 1929; oil on wood, 45 x 65.5 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation)

Concluding the exhibition is the critical reading of Fontanesi done between 1952 and 1954 by Roberto Longhi and Francesco Arcangeli. The latter wrote in the catalog of the exhibition Pittori Emiliani dell’Ottocento at Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna that “it would be misleading to want to include Fontanesi’s painting within regional, or even national, limits; for it rightfully belongs to the great European Romanticism.” Arcangeli thus saw in the Reggio Emilia master’s art the influences of English Romantics such as Constable and Turner. As he stated in his text The Romantic Space, Fontanesi’sromantic interpretation stemmed from an awareness ofanother idea of nature that had been developing since the first half of the 1950s. “Nature is no longer just the object of vision, of an empirical perception to be stopped on canvas. It is a new thought that moves from a state of mind and at the same time amplifies it”; the meaning of the word nature includes “all the irrational elements of the heart.” In his further essays, Arcangeli came to regard, thanks to the contribution ofinformal art, the art of both Constable and Turner as opening up to modernity. And in the so-called Last Naturalists he glimpsed, from a Romantic perspective, anextreme manifestation of the roots of modernity. This therefore applies to Ennio Morlotti (Lecco, 1910 - Milan, 1992), Pompilio Mandelli (Luzzara, 1912 - Bologna, 2006), Mattia Moreni (Pavia, 1920 - Brisighella, 1999), Sergio Romiti (Bologna, 1928 - 2000) and also for Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915 - Nice, 1995), who, although not belonging to the last naturalists, owes the critic an existential reading that approaches Romantic naturalism. On the other hand, Roberto Longhi also placed Fontanesi’s art alongside the English Romantics in the catalog of the XXVI Venice Biennale in 1952.

It is not by chance that Fontanesi’s painting entitled Tramonto sul Po a San Mauro (Sunset on the Po at San Mauro), dated 1878-1881, was chosen for this last section, where the attention to luministic effects and the intention to depict a space tending to infinity with strong emotional impact is very evident, but above all the tendency to make the expressive function of matter and color predominant, referring to the Turnerian lesson. Material painting that was predominant in the 1950s, exemplified in the exhibition by works such as Landscape on the River (Adda) or Study of Nudes (Bathers) by Ennio Morlotti, Autumn Landscape by Pompilio Mandelli, Composition by Sergio Romiti, Sun and Bramble by Mattia Moreni, where the layers of color seem to spill out of the canvas so thick, dense and literally kneaded together, to the use of different materials, as in this case torn jute, in Alberto Burri’s Abstraction with Brown Burlap (Sacco) .

Completing the exhibition are two parentheses dedicated to the cycle of paintings that Fontanesi made between 1845 and 1847 for the Caffè degli Svizzeri in Reggio Emilia and the work A Parella that became part of the collection of Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, in whose Piacenza Gallery a relevant nucleus of the artist’s works is kept. For the Caffè degli Svizzeri he was commissioned to paint five paintings to be placed on the walls of the store: these are very scenic works, with naturalistic views, to which is added the romantic sublime element, clearly recognizable especially in Eremo dopo il temporale and in La cascata. Only recently has the canvas depicting the View of Lake Constance with Reichenau Island, until not long ago known as Terrace and Garden on the Lake, been questioned: indeed, it has been confirmed that the canvas comes from Switzerland and is a view from life, in that it depicts Lake Constance with the island of Reichenau as seen from Wolfsberg Castle in Ermatingen; identification accomplished thanks to two nineteenth-century English etchings reproducing the same subject and on which the locality is written.

- sunset on the po, morlotti landscape, mandelli landscape, romiti composition, sun r ovo moreni, burlap burri

Ennio Morlotti, Landscape on the River (Adda) (1955; oil on canvas, 55 x 80 cm; Parma, Barilla Collection of Modern Art)

Pompilio Mandelli, Landscape (1952; oil on canvas, 75 x 80 cm; Private collection)

Sergio Romiti, Composition (1954; oil on canvas, 55 x 75 cm; Bologna, UniCredit Art Collection, Quadreria di Palazzo Magnani)

Mattia Moreni, Sun and Bramble (1956; oil on canvas, 170 x 100 cm; Private Collection)

Alberto Burri, Abstraction with brown burlap (Sacco) (1953; oil, paint, silk applications on jute, 85.7 x 100 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea)

Antonio Fontanesi, View of Lake Constance with the Island of Reichenau (c. 1850; oil on canvas, 179 x 192 cm; Reggio Emilia, Manodori Foundation Collection)

Antonio Fontanesi, The Waterfall (c. 1850; oil on canvas, 179 x 192 cm; Reggio Emilia, Manodori Foundation Collection)

Antonio Fontanesi, Bridge over the Stream (c. 1850; oil on canvas, 179 x 192 cm; Reggio Emilia, Manodori Foundation Collection)

Antonio Fontanesi, Hermitage after the Storm (c. 1850; oil on canvas, 179 x 192 cm; Reggio Emilia, Manodori Foundation Collection)

Regarding Ricci Oddi, the collector lover of nineteenth-century landscape painting was introduced to Fontanesi’s art perhaps thanks to the 1902 Turin exhibition or to the presence of the master’s works in the Turin Civic Museum in 1911. However, he dedicated an entire room with paintings, drawings and etchings to the Reggio Emilia artist in the family palace, and in 1925 came to own more than eighty of them.

In order to clearly delineate the painter’s life and art, the exhibition also offers a timeline and geographic maps, including his numerous moves from one city to another, and a chronological path of his critical reappraisal through the most significant exhibitions.

Antonio Fontanesi and His Legacy is proposed as a small, but well thought out and articulated exhibition, behind which a careful and accurate research work shared between the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia and GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna of Turin has been carried out. The subdivision of the sections defined by appropriate titles makes the exhibition usable and comprehensible to all visitors, even the youngest, for whom a special didactic path has been designed.

The catalog accompanying the exhibition includes in-depth essays on all sections of the exhibition, the works in the exhibition accompanied by their related cards (only for Fontanesi’s paintings) and a proposal for a critical anthology. Further useful tools to provide a comprehensive view of the purposes of the exhibition, already well presented and shared during the visit.

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