ARAROT0124286
Salvatore Mazza
Herd at rest
Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower left. Born in Milan in 1819, Salvatore Mazza graduated in law at the behest of his father but, starting to frequent student and patriotic circles, he met numerous artists engaged on the anti-Austrian front, who introduced him to painting and pushed him to abandon his law studies. In 1842 he exhibited for the first time in Brera, presenting five genre paintings; in the wake of Domenico Induno, Mazza initially proposed a painting with a realist and modern subject, above all subjects of contemporary history and popular setting scenes. In the same years he actively participated in the anti-Hapsburg uprisings, culminating in the Five Days of Milan, which he recounted in the autobiographical account, which he himself illustrated. After the revolutionary parenthesis, he wrote and illustrated a historical novel (The memorial of Fra 'Luca d'Avellino. Artistic and literary fantasies, 1850), contributing to the contemporary debate on the convenience of equipping literary texts with a figurative apparatus. This novel was cut short for the literary part by critics, but received the approval of critics and the public for the approximately 800 illustrations that accompanied it. Meanwhile, the pictorial production also resumed, once again aimed at historical and literary subjects, but in 1856 Mazza won the Mylius prize with the painting "A herd in rest" (initially preserved in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan but now untraceable), a recognition that led to the decision to limit the pictorial production of genre scenes in favor of landscapes and paintings of medium and small animals, the object of growing interest on the part of the Ambrosian entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Throughout the period of his artistic maturity, Mazza also supported painting with an intense activity as a draftsman and cartoonist for satirical newspapers and actively participated in the Milanese artistic life, as an academician of the Brera Academy and as an art critic. Salvatore Mazza died in 1886 in Milan. The work presented here is part of Mazza's pastoral production and proposes the same subject with which he won the Brera prize. The scene is set in a rugged mountain landscape, under snow-capped peaks with a decidedly alpine conformation. The central part is occupied by a group of men and animals (cows and goats) who, during the rest pause on the way, huddle together to seek warmth; squatting, the shepherd is lighting the campfire, flanked by a big boy. In the center, on the horse, a suggestive maternity with an almost sacred flavor: a woman holds a newborn baby in her arms, dressed in clothes which, due to the choice of colors - red and blue - quite explicitly recall the traditional representation of the Madonna, and they stand out chromatically throughout the rest of the scene, dominated by earthy tones of browns and shades of gray which then turns into the dirty white of the snows and clouds. There is therefore a sense of a religious appeal in a very rural and secular genre scene. The painting, which comes from a private Milanese collection, has been restored and relined. It is presented in a gilded frame from the end of the 19th century.
