Stampo per pittura

 

Terracotta depicting a male character seated, with belt, ear disc and elaborate headdress with front band decorated with a serpentiform pattern

Mould

 

Dating back to the years 1870-1875 by the scholar Andrea Baboni in the general catalogue of the Frugone Collections (2004), this masterpiece by Giovanni Fattori, a leading figure in the Macchiaioli group, entered the collection of the Genoese entrepreneur Gio. Batta Lazzaro Frugone (Genoa, 1860-1935) after 1929, when the work was still documented in the Vallecchi Collection, after having been, until 1928, in the possession of Mario Galli, a well-known collector of Fattori's works. In 1921 it was exhibited at the First Roman Biennale and registered as belonging to Cavalier Attilio Materazzi.
Fattori dedicated to the Tuscan river landscape, and in particular to a glimpse of the Arno and its banks, perhaps in the area between Bellariva and the Indian, a vision of solemn and emotional stillness, which is echoed in the painting "The Arno at Bellariva", now in a private collection in Leghorn. The colour of both, with its numerous shades of greens, greys and violets, and whites mixed with a vibrant light, is arranged, like tesserae in a mosaic and often clearly delimited by the outline mark superimposed on the hue, to compose the views. The work enriches the painting in the Raccolte Frugone and reaffirms its silent spatial immanence, the white bezel of the group of oxen and the chariot with the marble blocks in the centre of the canvas, enhanced and stemmed by the frothy verzura backdrop on the right and the horizontal coordinates of the banks. Another distinctive element, in the painting in the Genoese museum, is the presence of a peasant figure conceived by the Tuscan painter as a set of a few chromatic spots embedded in the swollen belly of an ox, signifying the zeroing of hierarchy in Factorian iconography in favour of the essence of nature rendered in the perfect synthesis of light and colour.