Le Sommet

On a snow-covered summit a pale woman stands holding an edelweiss, the small white flower that grows only high in the Alps, while an exhausted young man strains upward to reach her. Cesare Saccaggi, a painter from Tortona in the hills of Piedmont, built the whole picture as symbol. The woman is the goal that keeps its distance. The climber is the will to go beyond oneself, what German writers of the day called Streben, striving. It belongs to the Symbolist current that ran through European art at the turn of the century, drawn to allegory, thin mountain air, and longing. Saccaggi showed it to a wide public at the Venice international exhibition, where that dreamlike literalness was very much of the moment. It still hangs in a collection in his home town.