Giovanni Segantini
Encyclopedia
Giovanni Segantini was an Italian painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 known for his large pastoral landscapes of the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

. He was one of the most famous artists in Europe in the late 19th century, and his paintings were collected by major museums. In later life he combined a Divisionist
Divisionism
Divisionism was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically....

 painting style with Symbolist images of nature. He was active in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 for most of his life.

Biography

Giovanni Battista Emanuele Maria Segatini [sic] was born at Arco in Trentino, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later changed his family name by adding another "n" after the "a". He was the second child of Agostino Segatini (1802-1866) and Margherita de Giradi (1828-1865). His older brother, Lodovico, died in a fire the year Giovanni was born. During the first seven years of his life his father, who was a tradesman, traveled extensively while looking for work. Except for a six-month period in 1864 when Agostino returned to Trentino, Segantini spent his early years with his mother, who experienced severe depression due to the death of Lodovico. These years were marked by poverty, hunger and limited education due to his mother's inability to cope.

In the spring of 1865 his mother died after spending the past seven years in increasingly poor health. His father left Giovanni under the care of Irene, his second child from a previous marriage, and again traveled in search of work. He died a year later without returning home and leaving his family nothing. Without money from her father, Irene lived in extreme poverty. She was forced to spend most of her time working menial jobs while leaving Giovanni to subsist on his own.

Irene hoped to improve her life by moving to Milan, and in late 1865 she submitted an application to relinquish Austrian citizenship for both her brother and her. She either misunderstood the process or simply did not have enough time to follow through, and although their Austrian citizenship was revoked she neglected to apply for Italian citizenship. As a result, both Segantini and his sister remained stateless
Statelessness
Statelessness is a legal concept describing the lack of any nationality. It is the absence of a recognized link between an individual and any state....

 for the rest of their lives. After he became famous Switzerland offered him citizenship on more than one occasion, but he refused in spite of many hardships, saying Italy was his true homeland. After his death the Swiss government successfully awarded him citizenship.

At age seven Segantini ran away and was later found living on the streets of Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

. The police committed him to the Marchiondi Reformatory, where he learned basic cobbling skills but little else. For much of his early life he could barely read or write; he finally learned both skills when he was in his mid-30s. Fortunately a chaplain at the reformatory noticed that he could draw quite well, and he encouraged this talent in an attempt to lift his self-esteem.

In 1873 Segantini's half-brother Napoleon claimed him from the reformatory, and for the next year Segantini lived with Napoleon in Trentino. Napoleon ran a photography studio, and Segantini learned the basics of this relatively new art form while working there with his half-brother. He would later use photography to record scenes that he incorporated into his painting.

The following year he returned to Milan and attended classes at the Brera Academy
Brera Academy
The Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, also known as Brera Academy is a public academic institution located in Milan, Italy. It was founded in 1776 by HIM Maria Theresa of Austria.- Overview :...

. While there he became friends with members from a transformative movement known as Scapigliatura
Scapigliatura
Scapigliatura is the name of the artistic movement which developed in Italy after the period known as Risorgimento,...

 (the "Disheveleds"), which included artists, poets, writers and musicians who sought to erase the differences between art and life. Among his closest friends at the time were Carlo Bugatti
Carlo Bugatti
Carlo Bugatti was a notable decorator, architect , designer and manufacturer of Art Nouveau furniture, models of jewelry, musical instruments.- Biography :Son of Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, a specialist on internal decorations, Carlo studied at the Brera Academy...

 and Emilio Longoni
Emilio Longoni
Emilio Longoni was an Italian painter.-Biography:He was born in Barlassina on July 9, 1859, fourth of twelve children, from Garibaldi’s volunteer and horseshoer Matteo Longoni and from tailor Luigia Meroni....

, both of whom profoundly influenced his work and his interests.

His first major painting, The Chancel of Sant Antonio, was noticed for its powerful quality, and in 1879 it was acquired by Milan's Società per le Belle Arti. That work attracted the attention of painter and gallery owner Vittore Grubicy de Dragon
Vittore Grubicy de Dragon
Vittore Grubicy de Dragon was an Italian painter, art critic and art gallery owner who was largely responsible for introducing to Italy the optical theories that led to Divisionism in Italian painting. His writings and artistic examples influenced an entire generation of late 19th-century Italian...

, who became his advisor, dealer and his life-long financial supporter. Grubicy and his brother, Alberto, who was a co-owner of the gallery, introduced Segantini to the works of Anton Mauve
Anton Mauve
Anthonij Rudolf Mauve was a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School. He signed his paintings 'A. Mauve' or with a monogrammed 'A.M.'. He was a very significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.Most of Mauve's work depicts people and animals in...

 and Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...

. Both of these artists influenced Segantini's work for many years.

That same year he met Bugatti's sister, Luigia Pierina Bugatti (1862-1938), known as "Bice", and they began a life-long romance. Although Segantini tried to marry Bice the next year, due to his stateless status he could not be granted the proper legal papers. In opposition to this bureaucratic technicality, they decided to live together as an unmarried couple. This arrangement led to frequent conflicts with the Catholic church that dominated the region at this time, and they were forced to relocate every few years to avoid local condemnation.

In spite of these difficulties, Segantini was thoroughly devoted to Bice throughout his life. He wrote many love letters when he was away from her, sometime including wild flowers that he had picked. Once he wrote "Take these unsightly flowers, these violets, as a symbol of my great love, When a spring comes in which I fail to send you such violets, you will no longer find me among the living."

In 1880 he and Bice moved to Pusiano
Pusiano
Pusiano is a comune in the Province of Como, in the Italian region Lombardy, located about 40 km north of Milan, and about 15 km east of Como. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 1,225, and an area of 3.2 km²....

 and soon thereafter to the village of Carella, where they shared a house with their friend Longoni. It was in this mountain scenery that Segantini began to paint en plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...

, preferring to work in the outdoors than in a studio. While he worked outside Bice would read to him, and eventually he learned to read and write. Later he would write articles for Italian art magazines, and he was a prolific letter writer to Bice when he traveled and to other artists throughout Europe.

At this time he painted the first version of Ave Maria (Segantini Museum, St. Moritz), which took a gold medal at the 1883 World's Fair in Amsterdam Exhibition. As his fame rose, Segantini entered into a formal agreement with the Grubicys to be the sole representatives of his work. While this allowed Segantini more freedom to pursue his artistry, the dealers were consistently slow in fulfilling their financial obligations to the artists. The family struggled for many years in relative poverty, even as Bice gave birth to four children: Gottardo (1882-1974 ), Alberto (1883-1904), Mario (1885-1916) and Bianca (1886-1980). To help Bice care for his family, Segantini employed a young maid, Barbara "Baba" Uffer, who also became his favorite model for his paintings. Baba stayed with the family throughout their periods of penury and many households, but unlike many artist/model relationships of the time there is no evidence that they had any romantic involvement.

During this period Segantini produced several important paintings using Baba as a model, including Mothers, After a Storm in the Alps, A Kiss and Moonlight Effect (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen).

In 1886 Segantini sought a less expensive place to live and, attracted by the beautiful mountain scenery, he moved his family to Savognin
Savognin
Savognin is a municipality in the district of Albula in the canton of Graubünden in Switzerland....

, Graubünden
Graubünden
Graubünden or Grisons is the largest and easternmost canton of Switzerland. The canton shares borders with the cantons of Ticino, Uri, Glarus and St. Gallen and international borders with Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein...

. From November, 1886, to March, 1887, Grubicy stayed with the Segantinis in their new home. Excited by the recent work of Mauve and others, Grubicy suggested that Segantini further separate his colors in order to increase their brilliance. The artist applied this advice to a second version of Ave Maria, in which he used the Divisionist painting technique for the first time. His bolder style was immediately acclaimed by audiences; Segantini received gold medals in Munich (for Midday in the Alps) and Turin (for Ploughing). The following year the Walker Art Gallery
Walker Art Gallery
The Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England, outside of London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, and is promoted as "the National Gallery of the North" because it is not a local or regional gallery but is part...

 in Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 purchased his major painting, The Punishment of Lust.
It is thought that Grubicy introduced the concept of Symbolism
Symbolism
Symbolism is the applied use of symbols. It is a representation that carries a particular meaning. It is a device in literature where an object represents an idea.A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself....

 to Segantini during his recent visit. Because of his connections with artists in France, Grubicy would have known about the recently published Symbolist Manifesto
Symbolist Manifesto
The Symbolist Manifesto is a French work published in 1886 in France by the Greek poet and essayist Jean Moréas. It defines and characterizes Symbolism as a style whose "goal was not the ideal, but whose sole purpose was to express itself for the sake of being expressed." It names Charles...

 by Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas
Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

. This essay is credited with introducing visual artists to the then nascent literary movement lead by Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

, Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

, and Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...

.

At the 1890 Salon des XX in Brussels, Segantini was given an entire exhibition room, an honor awarded such greats as Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. While his fame had increased throughout Europe, he was never able to attend international shows because he could not obtain a passport due to his stateless status. Frustrated that the government would not grant him citizenship papers in spite of his fame, Segantini refused to pay cantonal taxes in Savognin. After creditors pursued him he moved his family to the Engadin
Engadin
The Engadin or Engadine is a long valley in the Swiss Alps located in the canton of Graubünden in southeast Switzerland. It follows the route of the Inn River from its headwaters at Maloja Pass running northeast until the Inn flows into Austria one hundred kilometers downstream...

 valley (altitude 5,954 feet/1,815 meters) in another part of Switzerland. There the high mountain passes and clear light become his chief subject matter for the next five years.

After he moved higher into the mountains he began to study philosophy, concentrating on those writers who questioned the meaning of life and one's place in the natural world. He studied Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio and Goethe and especially Nietzsche, becoming so fascinated with the latter that he drew an illustration for the first Italian translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885...

.

Soon after arriving he made the acquaintance of Giovanni Giacometti
Giovanni Giacometti
Giovanni Giacometti was a Swiss painter. He was the father of the artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and the architect Bruno Giacometti.- External links :*...

, father of Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...

, and an artist in his own right. Giacommetti would later paint a portrait of Segantini on his death bed and complete some of Segantini's unfinished works posthumously. Segantini also met and corresponded at length with Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo
Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo
Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo was an Italian painter. He was born and died in Volpedo, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy....

, an Italian Neo-Impressionist
Neo-impressionism
Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition...

 whose color techniques he admired.
Segantini continued to gain recognition in Italy, and in 1894 the Castello Sforzesco in Milan put on a retrospective of ninety of his works. At the first Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

 in 1895, Segantini was awarded the Prize of the Italian State for his painting Return to the Homeland. He continued to gain fame when a whole room was devoted to his work in the Munich Secession in 1896. After seeing his painting The Sad Hour in Munich, the director of the Alte Nationalgalerie
Alte Nationalgalerie
The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin is a gallery showing a collection of Classical, Romantic, Biedermeier, Impressionist and early Modernist artwork, all of which belong to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The museum is situated on Museum Island, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site.- Founding...

 in Berlin purchased the work for that museum. That same year his painting Ploughing is bought by the Neue Pinakothek
Neue Pinakothek
The Neue Pinakothek is an art museum in Munich, Germany. Its focus is European Art of the 18th and 19th century and is one of the most important museums of art of the nineteenth century in the world...

 in Munich.

In 1897 Segantini was commissioned by a group of local hotels to build a huge panorama of the Engadin valley to be shown in a specially built round hall at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. For this project he worked almost exclusively outdoors on large canvases covered by substantial wooden shelters. Before it was completed, however, the project had to be scaled down for financial reasons. Segantini redesigned the concept into a large triptych
Triptych
A triptych , from tri-= "three" + ptysso= "to fold") is a work of art which is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. It is therefore a type of polyptych, the term for all multi-panel works...

 known as Life, Nature and Death (Segantini Museum, St. Moritz), which is now his most famous work. He continued to work on it until his death.

Segantini's importance as an international artist was further established that same year when the Austrian state financed a luxury monograph on his work. Museums throughout Europe vied to buy his paintings, including The Comfort of Faith, purchased by the Hamburger Kunsthalle and The Bad Mothers (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere
The Österreichische Galerie Belvedere is a museum housed in the Belvedere palace, in Vienna, Austria.The art collection includes masterpieces from the Middle Ages and Baroque until the 21st century, though it focuses on Austrian painters from the Fin de Siècle and Art Nouveau period...

, Vienna), bought by the Vienna Secession. In 1899 an entire room is devoted to Segantini's work at the annual exhibition of the Societe des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Eager to finish the third part of his large tryptich, Nature (Segantini Museum, St. Moritz) Segantini returned to the high altitude of the mountains near Schafberg. The pace of his work, coupled with the high altitude, affected his health, and in mid-September he became ill with acute peritonitis
Peritonitis
Peritonitis is an inflammation of the peritoneum, the serous membrane that lines part of the abdominal cavity and viscera. Peritonitis may be localised or generalised, and may result from infection or from a non-infectious process.-Abdominal pain and tenderness:The main manifestations of...

. Two weeks later he died. His son Mario and his partner Bice were with him at his death bed.

At the end of November a memorial exhibition of his works was put on display in Milan. Two years later the largest Segantini retrospective to date took place in Vienna. In 1908 the Segantini Museum was established in St. Moritz
St. Moritz
St. Moritz is a resort town in the Engadine valley in Switzerland. It is a municipality in the district of Maloja in the Swiss canton of Graubünden...

, its design inspired by one of the sketches for the pavilions for the Engadine Panorama.

Themes

More than anything else, Segantini's work represents the quintessential transition from traditional nineteenth century art to the changing styles and interests of the twentieth century. He began with simple scenes of common people living off of the earth ‒ peasants, farmers, shepherds ‒ and moved toward a thematic symbolist style that continued to embody the landscapes around him while intertwining pantheistic
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...

 images representing "a primeval Arcadia." Over the course of his life he moved from both the physical and emotional internal, such as his scene of motherhood in a stable, to the grand external views of the mountain scenery where he chose to live.

Nature and the connections of people to nature are the core themes of his art. After he moved to the mountains he wrote "I am now working passionately in order to wrest the secret of Nature's spirit from her. Nature utters the eternal word to the artist: love, love; and the earth sings life in spring, and the soul of things reawakens."

His 1896 painting Love at the Springs of Life (Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Milan) reflects Segantini's philosophical approach to his art. Set in the high mountain landscape near his home, it pictures an angel with large wings spread over a small waterfall flowing from some rocks. In the distance two lovers, clothed in white flowing robes, walk along a path coming toward the spring. Around them are flowers that would have been seen by viewers at the time as symbols of love and life.

Art historian Robert Rosenblum described Segantini as transforming "the earthbound into the spiritual", and the artist himself referred to his work as "naturalist Symbolism." He said "I've got God inside me. I don't need to go to church."

Graubünden area

A signposted multiday trekking route passes areas that were common to the painter for his En plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...

painting.

External links

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