The Mirror of Life

The title comes from Dante. In the third canto of Purgatory, souls move forward like sheep leaving the fold, one, then two, then three, the others waiting timidly behind, and what the first one does, the others do. Pellizza borrowed that last line, slightly changed, for the full title of this canvas, and set the procession on the bank of the Curone, the stream that runs past his home village of Volpedo, with a flock nearly three metres long and no visible beginning or end.

He began from studies made outdoors in 1894 and worked on the painting from 1895 to 1898, reading treatises on optics as he went, among them the colour theory of the American physicist Ogden Rood. At its first showing, in Turin in 1898, it was hailed as one of the most significant pictures of the moment. The critic Ugo Fleres was less won over. He granted it might be a symbol, and called it poor in line and a bore. The plain wooden frame is the original, kept in a neutral tone so that the light of the canvas would stand out.