DOI article:
Thovez, Enrico: Artistic photography in Italy
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27086#0157
ITALY
concentrate all the interest in the face of the model, bathing in
darknesss the remainder of the figure and its surroundings. This
process is strikingly exemplified in the portrait of the sculptor
Reduzzi, which might well be styled a “ harmony in black and
silver,” and has a thoroughly Rembrandtesque savour. More
interesting still is the chiaroscuro in the portrait of the old painter
Dellcani, in which the expression of the face, worn and wrinkled by
age, is admirable in its force of character and its poetic suggestiveness.
There is no need to introduce M. Vittorio Sella, of Biella (Piedmont),
to the English public. For twenty years past his magnificent photo-
graphs of mountains have made him justly celebrated among Alpine
climbers and photographers.
None has been more successful than he in seizing the tones and the
forms of Alpine nature by photographic means. Immaculate
technical quality, and a deep feeling for the poetry of the mountain,
combine to make his photographs real pictures. In him the light
down of the mist, the glacier, the rough and jagged peak, the
delicate shadows falling on the snow, have an unequalled interpreter.
The photography of mountain tops, which before his time had
been nothing but a graphic document wherein Nature was made
artificial and despoiled of its atmosphere and its delicate nuances of
light and shade, has grown in his hands to be a work of art. He
realised that in order to convey the sense of the grandeur of these
Alpine giants one had not, as had been the photographer’s custom,
to seize them in an absolutely clear atmosphere, with the sun chasing
away every trace of shadow, but rather one must take them, as it
were, by surprise in the delicate hours of dawn or nightfall, when
the peaks are surrounded by clouds or veiled in mist.
But M. Vittorio Sella has not confined himself to the illustration of
the most picturesque parts of the Alpine ranges. He has travelled
far and wide, to seek other subjects in the mountainous districts of
Asia and America. He has gone to the “ frosty Caucasus,” to the
Himalayas, to Alaska, and, in the suite of the Duke of the Abruzzi,
to Mont St. Elia ; and therefrom has brought back some astonishing
series of pictures, full of poetry, grandiose and fascinating.
First we have the impending storm, a fantastic cavalcade of clouds,
photographed from the Cabane Sella, at Castore, in the Monte Rosa
group, wherein the heavy masses of vapour floating across the valley
are impregnated with a tragic grandeur. Then comes the Tour Ronde,
the peak which rises from the middle of the Mer de Glace, in the
Mont Blanc chain. The airy cloud, penetrated with light, which
crowns the blackness of the rock, subdues the brightness and invests
l- 7
concentrate all the interest in the face of the model, bathing in
darknesss the remainder of the figure and its surroundings. This
process is strikingly exemplified in the portrait of the sculptor
Reduzzi, which might well be styled a “ harmony in black and
silver,” and has a thoroughly Rembrandtesque savour. More
interesting still is the chiaroscuro in the portrait of the old painter
Dellcani, in which the expression of the face, worn and wrinkled by
age, is admirable in its force of character and its poetic suggestiveness.
There is no need to introduce M. Vittorio Sella, of Biella (Piedmont),
to the English public. For twenty years past his magnificent photo-
graphs of mountains have made him justly celebrated among Alpine
climbers and photographers.
None has been more successful than he in seizing the tones and the
forms of Alpine nature by photographic means. Immaculate
technical quality, and a deep feeling for the poetry of the mountain,
combine to make his photographs real pictures. In him the light
down of the mist, the glacier, the rough and jagged peak, the
delicate shadows falling on the snow, have an unequalled interpreter.
The photography of mountain tops, which before his time had
been nothing but a graphic document wherein Nature was made
artificial and despoiled of its atmosphere and its delicate nuances of
light and shade, has grown in his hands to be a work of art. He
realised that in order to convey the sense of the grandeur of these
Alpine giants one had not, as had been the photographer’s custom,
to seize them in an absolutely clear atmosphere, with the sun chasing
away every trace of shadow, but rather one must take them, as it
were, by surprise in the delicate hours of dawn or nightfall, when
the peaks are surrounded by clouds or veiled in mist.
But M. Vittorio Sella has not confined himself to the illustration of
the most picturesque parts of the Alpine ranges. He has travelled
far and wide, to seek other subjects in the mountainous districts of
Asia and America. He has gone to the “ frosty Caucasus,” to the
Himalayas, to Alaska, and, in the suite of the Duke of the Abruzzi,
to Mont St. Elia ; and therefrom has brought back some astonishing
series of pictures, full of poetry, grandiose and fascinating.
First we have the impending storm, a fantastic cavalcade of clouds,
photographed from the Cabane Sella, at Castore, in the Monte Rosa
group, wherein the heavy masses of vapour floating across the valley
are impregnated with a tragic grandeur. Then comes the Tour Ronde,
the peak which rises from the middle of the Mer de Glace, in the
Mont Blanc chain. The airy cloud, penetrated with light, which
crowns the blackness of the rock, subdues the brightness and invests
l- 7