悪しき母たち

Segantini painted this in 1894, high in the Engadine valley of the Swiss Alps, where he had settled to live close to the mountains he loved. The strange subject comes from a poem called Nirvana by the Italian writer Luigi Illica, better known later as an opera librettist. It imagined women who had refused motherhood, drifting through a frozen, empty landscape as a kind of penance. One of them hangs tangled in a bare tree, an infant's face pressed against her. Segantini built the whole scene from separate threads of pure colour laid side by side, a method called Divisionism, so the snow seems to shimmer with real cold light. He called it himself a symphony of whites and blues, silver and gold. He died five years later at 41, in a mountain hut above Saint Moritz while at work on another Alpine picture.