A hymn to light: Gaetano Previati's "Dance of the Hours," between music and poetry

A hymn to light: one could define Gaetano Previati’s Dance of the Hours in this way, taking up a happy image by Domenico Tumiati. One of his most poetic, most mysterious, most elevated, most luminous, most triumphant masterpieces: the twelve Hours of Roman mythology, the personifications of the different moments of the day, dance holding hands in flight over the earth, while the sun floods the entire composition with golden light. Between the star and the planet, the twelve women, blond, graceful and full of grace in their flight, hold up with their fingertips a thin, blazing ellipse: it is the circle of light, the continuous cycle of day and night alternating endlessly, the circle of time flowing without end. And Previati’s Hours are divine creatures, appearing to us almost bodiless. Look at the filamentous brushstrokes of the master of pointillism in one of the happiest moments of his career, the sparkle of the sun’s rays, the circular motion that the painter imparts to the entire composition simply by using the brush: everything contributes to zeroing in on the bodily evidence of the figures of the dancers. The color, which becomes light, defibrates the volumes, strips them of their substance, erases their physicality: what remains is rhythm, movement, light, dance, music, dream. “Pure vibration,” Tumiati would say.

Previati’s is a universe of light that feeds on Symbolist poetry (Baudelaire, for example: the sun that “commande aux moissons de croître et de mûrir / dans le cœur immortel qui toujours veut fleurir”), which was born under the clear, sparkling skies of Liguria, during his first stays in Lavagna, where the artist knew and explored further possibilities of color, and which seems to come to life from the notes of Amilcare Ponchielli: the premiere of La Gioconda, the opera by the Cremonese composer famous above all for the immortal music of the Dance of the Hours, had been held at La Scala on April 8, 1876, and that danceable had been an immediate and unanimous success. The same cannot be said for the opera itself, which was criticized for being too long: curiously enough, it is the same criticism that, almost forty years later, would be levelled at Mascagni and D’Annunzio’s Parisina , illustrated by drawings by Previati himself. The Ferrara painter was certainly familiar with Ponchielli’s Danza delle Ore , so much so that one wanted to see in the painting a translation of it in painting. A juxtaposition that perhaps continues in part to condition the fortunes of this masterpiece. A masterpiece that was also coolly received when it was first exhibited to the public.

Gaetano Previati, Dance of the Hours (1899; oil and tempera on canvas, 134 x 200 cm; Milan, Fondazione Cariplo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia di Piazza Scala)

It was the 1899 Venice Biennale, the third. According to what Nino Barbantini reports in his sumptuous monograph on Previati given to the presses in 1919, the conception of the large painting dated back to five years earlier: the artist therefore had to mull over his work for a long time, but this was not enough to avoid criticism, even heavy criticism, in the aftermath of the exhibition. The reviews of that Biennale were ungenerous towards Dance of the Hours. For Vittorio Pica, one of the greatest art critics of the time, the work, “with its twelve damsels who, dressed in tenuous veils and with their hair fluttering, hold up a thin circle on the earth’s disk, while the sun beams down on them from the side, is too simple and too little new as an invention for an easel painting,” and again in his opinion “the drawing of the figures is excessively neglected by it.” For Ugo Fleres the painting is a “sort of rebus with geometric signs, painted in two dull colors, yellowish and purplish, with the usual filamentous technique of the author.” For Mario Morasso it is even "a mean symbol of the Dance of the Hours," Ponchielli’s of course. Mario Pilo, from the pages of the Gazzetta letteraria, recalled his colleagues by pointing out to them that the Danza delle Ore “may be liked more or less, but [...] in any case it must be taken seriously.” Even Barbantini, one of the friends who were closest to Previati and one of his critics of reference, in the monograph published twenty years later reproached him for having painted the Dance of the Hours “without warmth and without passion, concluding to a dry and superficial decorativism,” similar to that of the Pre-Raphaelite George Frederic Watts, among the English painters closest close to the instances of Symbolism, probably known to Preivati, as well as known to him, Chiara Vorrasi recently pointed out, were the principles on the unity and harmony of thework theorized by John Ruskin (repetition, curvature, radiance), Charles Henry’s theories on color and light, and Victorian symbolism that employed decoration to create “a spatiality independent of reality.”

The abandonment of any narrative register, the turn toward a painting of pure light, and the openness to international experiences are perhaps the reasons why Previati’s mysterious painting was not understood and appreciated, although the hostility of critics toward it did not last long: as early as 1901, as part of the fourth Biennale, Pica himself curated a solo exhibition of the artist’s work that was instead received with substantial favor, and Alberto Grubicy, Previati’s gallery owner, tried to take advantage of every good opportunity to exhibit the Dance of the Hours, which still in 1901 was shown not only at the Venetian solo show but also at the Eighth Munich International Exhibition at the Glaspalast, and then in the following years met with numerous other exhibitions. The end result was the purchase of the work in 1927 by the Cassa di Risparmio di Milano: and even today the Dance of the Hours figures in the collection of that bank’s last heir, the Intesa Sanpaolo group.

What were the high achievements Previati reached with his ethereal, refined, radiant painting? The first is of a formal nature: it is the further refinement of his research on light. The Ferrarese painter’s golden light is here the real protagonist of the painting, modulated according to tonal chords that multiply its intensity and that are divided among the long, thin filaments that meet and support Previati’s sinuous line and give the painting its swirling circular motion. Umberto Boccioni, who knew Previati personally, would always be indebted to his pointillist poetics: he carefully studied his writings and paintings, also visited his studio, and confronted Previati. For Boccioni, Previati “is the first truly who attempts to express by means of light itself an emotion outside the conventional reproduction of forms and colors.”

The second, on the other hand, is of an ideal character: in his union of painting, literature, dance and music, Previati had succeeded in bringing to life a Wagnerian Gesammtkunstwerk , a total work of art that is capable of arousing synaesthetic sensations and giving form to that musical ideism that Vittore Grubicy already recognized in 1891 when speaking of his Maternity, the Ferrarese: “an abstract, mystical idea, indefinite in its parts, whose aesthetic beauty [...] lies precisely in this symbolic indeterminacy.” This soul of Previati’s painting was well understood by Domenico Tumiati: the great Ferrarese poet, a convinced advocate of an aestheticizing criticism, had well understood how Previati, with his paintings, had succeeded in bringing out the unconscious, the mystery, the dream, a “new form of spirituality, an abstraction of the senses,” the “immaterial idea,” the essence of life itself. The Dance of the Hours is the work that closes the article published by Tumiati, in 1901, in Emporium magazine: it was almost a kind of viaticum to the artist’s rehabilitation after an early part of his career with mixed fortunes. Here, Tumiati wrote, “the secret that reveals the artist’s emotion, lies in the method employed, keeping the few component colors divided, and always distending them in thin, circular hatching. From the photosphere to the circle, from the circle to the globe, from the radiant atmosphere to the swirls of the veils and the hair of the dancers, everything draws the circle of vital light,” that circle which is the “prime origin of life,” because everything in the universe is the fruit of light. And with those dancers, with that “hymn of twelve stanzas toward the Sun,” with that radiant light that spreads throughout the composition, Previati would have been worthy of illustrating Dante’s Paradise . Such was, according to Tumiati, Previati’s affinity with the father of our literature.

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