By the early 1930s, Sacchi’s poetics had reached a peak, and in the “stones” of Venice he recognized his main source of inspiration. In this painting the artist seems to have taken up, freely transfiguring it, an insight of the 19^th-century Venetian painter Antonio Zona who, in Un Canto Funebre (1862, Turin, GAM) – a work which enjoyed considerable fortune – had proposed a choir of women and girls in the foreground against the background of a bridge in Venice, while in this case a slow and solemn funeral procession is taking place.

By bringing the bridge with its characteristic masks to the fore and superimposing above it the faces of girls depicted while singing, Sacchi has skewed any realistic suggestion to instead propose a vaguely surreal juxtaposition between the faces suspended in the void and the deformed yet harmonious stone masks which match and unite with the “chorus” – a montage that allowed the artist to unveil his caricatural-surreal vein and to attune it to a rather neglected aspect of Venetian life, namely, the keystones which dot the doorframes of the palazzi and decorate some Venetian bridges, in particular the Ponte delle Guglie, but also that of San Polo (depicted by Sacchi in Davanti al Ponte, cat. of Paintings No. 53). The stone masks – old fawns, canine and leonine protomes – are allowed, between the whimsical, clever and joking, to sing a chorus along with these innocent-looking girls with their seraphic faces, while from below the bridge appears a dove in flight, perhaps a symbol of the pact made. In a painting like this, with its palpable programmatic intent, it must be emphasized that the notion of innocence which makes even the most deformed stones sing – corresponds to a twofold pictorial treatment, referable to two very precise moments of the artist’s evolution: on the one hand, the girls’ faces in profile, with the emphasis on the contours and flat planes, a kind of self-expression from previous works and attributable to a taste shared with Cadorin in the twenties; on the other, the quirky and tonally dramatic painting of the masks, the sign of a recent evolution and a stylistic constant for many years to come. In the same period, around 1930, Sacchi conceived the La Visitazione (cat. of Paintings No. 31) in which the heads of the two women have been cut, metaphysically, at the height of the neck and placed in the foreground, confirming the presence of an effective metonymic approach even in the early thirties.