SEGANTINI, Giovanni

(b. 1858 Arco, d. 1899 Schafberg)

Italian painter. Born in 1858 in Arco, in the province of Trient, on the northern bank of Lake Garda, Giovanni Segantini attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Subsequently, he lived in the Brianza region, and then moved to Switzerland in 1886. He first settled with his family in Savognin, but from 1894 he was based in Maloja and Soglio. Segantini died of peritonitis in 1899, at the early age of 41, while working on the middle section of his Alpine Triptych, Nature, on the Schafberg high above Pontresina.

Already during his lifetime, Segantini was celebrated through much of Europe as an innovator and prophet, as well as an important Symbolist painter. His early works, executed in Milan and Brianza, still bear testimony to the traditional Lombard style of painting. After moving the Alps, with its pure, clear air, the artist was able to develop a style which exuded radiance and at the same time went hand in hand with the evolution of the Divisionism painting technique and his progression towards Symbolism.

At the end of the 19th century, Giovanni Segantini executed a panorama conveying an underlying universal truth; his impressive Alpine Triptych, Life - Nature - Death, was one of the last paintings of its kind in that era. The work - a large-dimensional portrayal of the life cycle - was intended for the Paris World Exhibition in 1900 and depicts human existence in harmony with nature. The landscapes and simple characters portrayed are woven into the eternal rhythm of the changing seasons.

An exponent of Divisionism, Segantini was the only Italian painter of the late 19th century to have enjoyed an unbroken international reputation, especially in Germany and Austria.

Midday in the Alps (Windy Day)

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Ploughing

In the 1880s, Lombardy began to play an active part in Italian art. The movement that originated there declared its loyalty to the great Italian tradition, and was particularly interested in atmospherics of light, colour, and texture. In the 1890s, such work came into its own with divisionist or pointillist paintings.

From 1886 on, Segantini, an Italian divisionist, developed his own technique for splitting colours, using separate brush-strokes for complementary colour values. His art concentrated on the light in the mountains, which provided him with a preferred subject which he tended to interpret in strongly Symbolist ways.

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The Last Journey (Return to Native Soil)

This scene typifies an elegiac, melancholic aspect of European art of the fin-de-si�cle. Here the Tyrolian painter shows a farm labourer’s journey to burial, returned to the earth he had long worked, the cart bearing his coffin and a mourner now drawn by the same horse that had pulled his plow. Immutable mountains rising in the background, in what becomes akin to a frieze, contrast with the pathetic mortality of the foreground cort�ge.

This canvas was completed in 1895 and won the First International Prize given by the Italian government in the Venetian Biennale of that year.

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