Lo scialle bianco - Mose Bianchi

(Monza 1840 - 1904)
Cm 68x48 | In 26.77x18.90
Oil on cardboard
Son of drawing teacher and modest painter Giosuè and Luigia Meani, having completed his technical studies, he enrolled in 1856 at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he was a pupil of Schmidt, Bisi, Zimmermann, Sogni and director Giuseppe Bertini, having as classmates Federico Faruffini, Tranquillo Cremona, Daniele Ranzoni and Filippo Carcano with whom he would share the Milanese studio in Via San Primo for a few years. He took part in the War of Independence in 1859; his 7 first paintings belong to the Romantic strand, following Bertini's indications: the 1861 Ritratto di Simonetta Galimberti and Ritratto di Giacinta Galimberti, in the Musei civici di Monza; L'arciprete Stefano Guandeca accusa l'arcivescovo di Milano Anselmo Pusterla di tradimento sacrilego, 1862, in a private collection; and Congiura di Pontida, 1862, exhibited at Brera in 1862 and 1863. He finished his studies in 1864 and was commissioned the Communion of St. Louis for the parish church of Sant'Albino, near Monza. He turned to naturalistic representation within the narrative taste of the brothers Domenico and Gerolamo Induno in works such as Una lezione di canto corale, La vigilia della sagra, 1864, Lo sparecchio dell'altare, 1865, which drew the attention of critics to his painting, but with Cleopatra and La Signora di Monza, 1865, he fell back into the melodramatic genre of pseudo-historical romantic painting. In 1867 he won with L'ombra di Samuele appears to Saul the pensioner Oggioni, who financed his two-year stay in Venice, where he studied 18th-century painting, Rome, and Paris, where he was impressed by the painting of Meissonier and Fortuny. In 1869 he returned to Milan, where he presented I fratelli sono al campo, at Brera, in which, depicting some young women emphatically prostrate in prayer for the salvation of their brothers fighting in the Third War of Independence, he combined the verism of the image with the rhetoric of patriotic and religious sentiment, meeting with great success among the Milanese bourgeoisie. A councillor since 1871 of the Brera Academy and by now a fashionable painter, in La benedizione delle case, of 1870, he expresses, as in Una buona fumata of 1872, which won the Principe Umberto Prize in 1877, a genre bozzettismo; in La pittrice, of 1874, as in I convenevoli and Una lezione di musica, he gives himself over to the leziosità of the neo-settecentesco genre while he has a chance to show portraiture mastery in Ritratto di Elisabetta Sottocasa, which again wins the Principe Umberto Prize, in Ritratto dell'ingegner Carlo Mira and in Ritratto di Luigi Galbiati, of 1876. He began in the late 1870s his activity as a fresco painter oriented toward Tiepolo: from 1877 is the cycle of frescoes in the Villa Giovanelli in Lonigo, near Vicenza, from 1883 to 1884 the decoration of the Royal Station in Monza with The Genius of the Savoy family, and from 1885 the decorations of Palazzo Turati in Milan. Moses Bianchi, in this period, was also busy fostering the artistic abilities of his nephew Pompeo Mariani; in fact, thanks to his uncle, who brought him to draw his first views of Monza Park, Pompeo would begin his artistic career, gaining fame at the European level. On repeated trips to Venice he produced lagoon views that gained him great popularity, so much so that he repeated numerous versions of one of his most successful canvases, La laguna in burrasca, 1879, in the Godi Valmarana Museum in Lugo Vicentino. He was admired by his contemporaries Antonio Fontanesi and Domenico Morelli, who considered his painting to be of extraordinary modernity; the canvas The Word of God, 1887, shows the aid of photography in his painting, and with The Washerwomen, 1894, he made his contribution to the depiction of the life of the "humble." After a brief stint as a city councilor in Milan and unsuccessfully attempting to obtain a teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, in 1890 he painted a series of alpine views in Gignese, above Lake Maggiore, that are a tribute to Lombard naturalism: among them, House of the Shepherd and Sheep at the Stream where, given a photographic slant to the image, he lingers on the luministic relationship between the water and the large stone boulders. To the same year belong a series of views of Milan, such as Milan under the snow, Milanese suburbs along the Naviglio and Cavalcando, a sunset on the dock of Porta Ticinese. He also devoted himself to etching and in 1896 was awarded a prize in the National Chalcography Competition. In 1898 he was appointed teacher and director of the Accademia Cignaroli in Verona, but an illness that arose in December 1899 forced him to return to Monza and abandon painting. The artist died in Monza on March 15, 1904, and is buried in Monza Cemetery. Critical appraisal: "Tenacious and careful studies had endowed him with a perfect technique; early essays (marked by a murky romanticism of literary inspiration), in contact with the great eighteenth-century Venetian painters, were followed by pictorially healthier works, of a more restrained romanticism resting on a nourished and energetic color" (Pischel). "He was a firm draughtsman, a disorderly composer, an outspoken painter, juicy, fresh, varied in that chromaticism of his in which the color of the Venetians echoes without fading, an expert in every secret of art in rendering the fineness of atmosphere and in modeling with the efficacy of the nervous brushstroke" (Colasanti).