Women Carrying Bundles of Firewood

A canvas shaped like a frieze, 62.5 centimetres high and 134 wide. Three women cross open country under bundles of firewood, one ahead and two behind, with a cart and small figures on a hillside beyond them. Banti began working towards the composition around 1878, and five preparatory studies for it are known. The picture carries a second title, Predone, the raider, which is how the gathering of firewood by the rural poor was often regarded at the time. Between November 1991 and March 1992 the gallery lent it to the Vatican for the exhibition marking a hundred years since Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's encyclical on the condition of workers, published in 1891. Banti was 67 that year and living at Montemurlo.