“Where is the poet of the highest mountain peaks? And, dare I ask, where is the painter?”.
During a journey through the mountains of the Engadin in 1906, Giuseppe Pellizza jotted this question down in his diary. Retracing the paths so dear to his friend Giovanni Segantini, the painter from Volpedo pondered on what he described as “the highest mountains” and on their potency, their energy and their secrets.
The theme of Alpine peaks was very common in 1880s Lombard landscape painting. Considering their epic, slow life and their terse, crystalline light, Segantini chose the mountains as the eternal subject of his work, making them the mirror and the fulcrum of a universe where man’s limited timespan compares and comes together with the eternal timespan of nature.
Many were the painters who were so fascinated by the extreme character and absolute power of his landscapes that they saw the high mountains as a source of inspiration.
In this room, while Delleani’s Lake of Mucrone tackles the mountains and their fascinating character by telling us about the-then new social pursuits of mountaineering and high-elevation tourism, the works of Carcano, Gola and Cavaleri reveal their more poetic side.
The visualisation that Carcano and Cavaleri bequeathed to us in their open vistas is a truly emotional, almost psychological one: from our lofty vantage point, we look out on a landscape that stretches to a distant horizon, gradually fading and losing colour in the sheer vastness that encounters us. Nature is not just suggested in its essence of light and colour: this is a nature that becomes sentiment, both individual and universal, such that, when we are faced with its infinite horizons, the words of the poet Leopardi come to mind: “amidst this immensity my thought drowns, and to founder in this sea is sweet to me”.
The way that the mountain is presented is equally immense in the majestic Cambrena glacier, where the observer is overwhelmed by the same sensation of the infinite. The tiny flowers that carpet the ground around the little Alpine lake look minute and even more delicate when seen together with the powerful majesty of the glacier. The artist’s eye dwells on nature and captures its most intimate essence, sending us a sensation of sublime wonder: the measure of a time and a space that remain unfathomable for mankind.