Angelo Inganni

Angelo Inganni (Brescia 1807-Gussago 1880) - View of Piazza dei Mercanti or The passage from Piazza dei Mercanti to the Pescheria Vecchia H cm 46.5x36 - in frame H cm 57x45 Oil on canvas Signed and dated at lower right. Expertise of Professor Claudio Strinati: "The very fine painting is signed by Angelo Inganni and is a typical work of his late period, that is, executed during the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, when the master, after various interesting events developed between Milan and Vienna, devoted himself with great commitment and fervor to the representation of daily life in the city, with a most felicitous sense of perspective and with a magnificent aptitude for narrative painting crammed with figurines that were always strongly characterized, scattering his pictures with anecdotes and episodes of all kinds that render as best they could the tumult of a lively and teeming life. From his early youth, to be fair, Inganni had followed this kind of approach, but over time his style became more minute and delicate, and our painting, here under consideration, fully reflects this extreme stylistic shift. In this work, then, one can still feel very vividly the influence, which had been decisive in his early phase, of the great "city painters" belonging to the generation that had preceded him, such as the Piedmontese Giovanni Migliara or the Venetian Giuseppe Canella. From these artists Inganni draws, precisely, that taste for the urban narrative that characterizes so many memorable moments of European painting in the first half of the 19th century. But compared to his predecessors, Inganni has more right than ever to be considered (as our painting sufficiently demonstrates) the painter par excellence of the popolo minuto and petty bourgeoisie. In our painting one stands beside the other with naturalness and simple spontaneity, but at the same time the artist's eye is amiably involved with the joys and sufferings of everyday life. All of this is dropped into a very precise perspective structure where the gaze sweeps to distant horizons looming over the closed tangle of alleys and small squares. The area of Milan represented in the painting under consideration here is the one where the painter practiced for decades, the area around the Church of San Marco, which still exists even though it has been profoundly transformed by modern urban planning. A beautiful testimony of a truly distinguished painter with a work, moreover, perfectly preserved."