SEGANTINI, GIOVANNI

Having been left motherless as a child, he was taken by his father, a carpenter, to Milan, but soon abandoned by him as well and entrusted to a stepsister, he endured a very difficult youth. Having managed to enter the Brera Academy, in 1879 he distinguished himself with a painting titled: Coro di S. Antonio, which, like others from that early period, shows connections with the style of the contemporary Milanese milieu. A friend of Longoni, Mentessi, and Luigi Grubicy, he was influenced by the latter’s technical research oriented toward Divisionism (v.). Having moved in 1881 first to Brianza and then to Savognino, in search of ever clearer atmospheres, he came to express, in a group of works of high lyrical value, his sincere love for nature and its manifestations. Gifted with a strong decorative sense, he often used it to convey the deeper meanings of sometimes generic moralistic and humanitarian allegories born from his own loving contemplation of creation. Thus in *Due madri* (1889) at the Galleria d’arte moderna in Milan and in the later *Amore alle fonti della vita* and *Angelo della vita* from the same collection, painted after he moved in 1894 to Maloja. Other works of great quality and rightly famous are held in Italian and foreign museums and collections: such as *Ragazza che fa la calza* (1888) at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and *Alla stanga* at the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome. — See pl. XV.