International studio (23.1904)

Giovanni Segantini

“edelweiss”: design for lunette of triptych
BY GIOVANNI

* This picture is entitled The Source oj Evil,
and was suggested by the popular superstition that
a woman who is too fond of looking at her own
reflection will one day see the Devil. A serpent,
unseen as yet by the girl, is in fact lifting its head
on the further side of the water.— Translator s
SEGANTINI Note.


The Fruit of Love, exhibited for the first time at
Florence in 1895, and before which the majority of
the public, disturbed in their usual habits of envisag-
ing things, either stood dumbfounded or indulged
in more or less facetious comment.
But already in 1897 Segantini, in his last com-
pleted work (exhibited at Vienna in the exhibition
of the Secessionists), the subject of which was the
nude figure of a young girl with long fair hair, who
in the midst of a little valley encircled by high
mountains is contemplating the snare of her beauty
in the mirror made by the limpid waters of a pool,*

showed an indication of yet another style, which
should combine and harmonise his realistic
naturalism and his symbolic vision.
This new manner, amounting to a fresh develop-
ment of Segantini’s genius, would have definitely
asserted itself in the great triptych—Life, Nature,
Death, 13.50 metres in length by 5.30 metres in
height, which although unfinished (for it lacks the
three symbolic lunettes and the four decorative
medallions, of which there are only the charcoal
drawings and the first sketch upon the canvas,
while the left panel also has never been brought to
completion) calls up before us, with
a conviction of reality and a power
of suggestion hard to surpass, the
mountains covered with snow and
glorified by the sun, and the life of
the mountaineers, considered in its
three essential phases : the coming
into existence; the painful daily toil;
and the withdrawal into the nothing-
ness of death.
This triptych, the supreme achie-
vement of the famous painter of
Arco (specimens of whose work had
already been exhibited to the English
public on three occasions during his
lifetime—in 1888, 1892, and 1898),
has been on view since the begin-
ning of June this year at the Italian
Exhibition at Earl’s Court, together
with a vigorous example of his
second period, The Two Mothers,
and an exquisitely fanciful symbolic
picture in his third manner, A
Musical Allegory.
Face to face with these, everyone
of true artistic taste must yield to
a feeling of most sincere and pro-
found admiration, a feeling that
must be tinged with sadness at the
thought that such a bounteous
source of aesthetic joy should have
prematurely run dry. What astound-
ing and delightful revelations might
we not have expected in the future
from so fertile an artist’s brain, a
faculty of perception so clear and

3*4