The Religion of the Departed

Carlo Bonatto Minella painted this picture in 1878, the last year of his short life. He set it in the ancient world, with echoes of Etruscan and Roman burial places, a woman beside a column inside a walled tomb enclosure, with sacrificial offerings laid out like still lifes. The archaeology is carefully studied, yet the Turin gallery's catalogue says what drew him was the human melancholy of the scene. His colour, somewhere between ivory and ash, pushes even the precise offerings back into the realm of memory. A writer who set out to rescue his name in 1972 noted how little the setting is closed in, the enclosure only hinted at on the right, and how sharply the woman's white and wine-red clothes and the ribbons hanging from the column stand out against its cold grey stone. The painting entered the city's collection in 1922.