Fiumana

In the first days of May 1898 troops in Milan opened fire on crowds protesting the price of bread. That same year Pellizza, who had been turning one subject over since 1891, left this canvas where it stood and began the whole composition again on a bigger one.

What he left is two and a half metres high and nearly four and a half across. Three figures come forward out of a crowd held back in shadow, two men and a woman carrying a child. The ground under them is the beaten earth of the square in front of the Malaspina palace in Volpedo, the village he came from, and the people who posed were his neighbours there.

The version he started instead is Il Quarto Stato, finished in 1901, set in full daylight, and now in Milan's Galleria d'Arte Moderna. It went on to be reproduced on posters and book covers all over Italy. This canvas stayed with the painter's heirs into the 1940s and only reached Brera in 1986.