An international artist in Paris in the 1870s, an official painter of the Kingdom of Italy at the end of the century, host of the Cenacle at Francavilla al Mare, which brought together such personalities as Gabriele d’Annunzio, Francesco Paolo Tosti, Paolo De Cecco and Costantino Barbella, Francesco Paolo Michetti (Tocco da Casauria 1851 – Francavilla al Mare 1929) was one of the leading lights of Italian painting at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. He achieved success at the National Exposition of Naples in 1877 with La Processione del Corpus Domini a Chieti(private collection), a striking and somewhat overwhelming work which drew the public into a festive and unexpected setting, and further consolidated his fame with the solemn figures organized in the polycentric space of Il Voto, purchased at the 1883 International Exposition of Rome by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. The artist ceaselessly narrated his Abruzzo, between land and sea, whose ancient ancestral customs were disappearing under the pressure of modernity. The region’s nature and people became the protagonists of a great cyclical and symbolic poem of life and death, joy and pain, in which each work constituted a song. Michetti described a pastoral, agricultural and maritime world, populated by figures in perpetual movement, engaged in everyday occupations, but also portrayed in their finery on holidays. In 1881, he exhibited for the first time at the Exposition of Milan, under the generic title of Studi a Tempera,a whole universe of characters, the basis of research increasingly focused on the face, as attested by the numerous studies made for Il Voto. “By doing an analysis of human physiognomy, the master sought, found, and became able to extract the type [...]. Some of those heads are wonders of psychological penetration and workmanship”,¹ d’Annunzio commented in 1896 in a key essay on the artist. These heads were then presented at the 1884 Exposition of Turin as heliotypes, made with an “incisive touch, determined, severely concise”² which captivated the critics. This had become an established practice of study. The faces, postures, and costumes of the models were investigated through photography and mixed-technique works on paper, which came to constitute, rather than studies, genuine autonomous works. Michetti’s thinking was circular. The protagonists of the Abruzzo epos, which found its acme in the numerous works dedicated to the theme of the Figlia di Jorio, were inserted in complex compositions but also portrayed individually in a continuous mutual exchange between collective and individual, painting and photography.

The work under examination, reminiscent of a photographic edit, is documented by a period photo kept in the Michetti photographic archive (fig. 1).

 

1. Testa di fanciulla, period photo, Archivio Michetti

 

The emotion in the face of this young commoner from Abruzzo, which completely floods the space of the composition, is fixed as if in a snapshot. At the turn of the 1880s and the early ’90s, Michetti cannily turned to black and white, achieving near-photographic results. Here, the different shades of grey evoke the texture of the cloth of the handkerchief, the shimmering of the earrings and golden necklace and above all the pale colour of the model’s eyes, a young girl with blue eyes who appeared between 1883 and 1888 in at least three other works. A first portrait in profile (private collection, fig. 2) is dated 1883, followed in 1887 by a second in which the young woman is depicted at a slightly later age (fig. 3, Milan, Casa di Riposo per Musicisti Fondazione Giuseppe Verdi).

Finally, the same model appears in a full figure in Incontro a Francavilla (fig. 4, private collection), a work exhibited at the 1887 Venice Biennale and already part of the Savoy collection.