Oil painting on canvas. Signed at the bottom left.
Born in Milan in 1819, Salvatore Mazza graduated in law by the will of the Father but, beginning to attend student and patriotic circles, he met numerous artists engaged on the anti-sinistrian front, which introduced him to painting and pushed him to abandon his law studies. In 1842 he exhibited for the first time in Brera, presenting five gender paintings; In the wake of Domenico Induno, the Mazza initially proposed a realistic and modern subject painting, especially subjects of contemporary history and popular setting scenes. In the same years he actively participated in the antasburg moths, culminated in the five days of Milan, of which he said in the autobiographical story, 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 accompanying the literary texts of a figurative apparatus. This novel was crouched for the literary part by critics, but collected the approval of critics and the public for about 800 illustrations that corrected it.
Meanwhile, the pictorial production also resumed towards historical and literary subjects, but in 1856 the Mazza won the Mylius Award with the painting 'a resting herd' (initially preserved at the Pinacoteca di Brera di Milano but now irresibly), recognition that He led to decide to limit the pictorial production of gender scenes in favor of landscapes and paintings of medium and small animals, the subject of an increasing interest from the Ambrosian entrepreneurship bourgeoisie.
Throughout the period of his artistic maturity, the Mazza flanked to painting also an intense designer and cartoonist activity for satirical newspapers and actively participated in the Milanese artistic life, as an academician of the Accademia of Brera and as a critic of art.
Salvatore Mazza died in 1886 in Milan.
The work presented here is part of the pastoral production of the bat and proposes the same subject with which he won the Brera award.
The scene is set in an impervious mountain landscape, under snow-covered peaks of decidedly alpine conformation. The central part is occupied by a group of men and animals (cows and goats) which, in the rest break on the way, shake each other to look for warmth; Combined, the shepherd is lighting the focus of the bivouac, flanked by a child sorrows.
At the center, on the horse, a suggestive maternity of almost sacred flavor: a woman holds a newborn between her arms, covered with clothes that, for the choice of colors - red and blue - Retimed rather explicitly the traditional representation of the Madonna, and Chromatically stand out throughout the rest of the scene, dominated by the terrible terrain tones and the nuances of the gray that then turns into the white dirty white and clouds.
There is therefore a religious call to a very rural and secular gender scene.
The painting, coming from a private Milanese collection, has been restored and retracted.
It is presented in a golden frame of the end of 800.
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