Joseph Mentessi's "Sad Vision": the secular ordeal of forgotten workers

Bava Beccaris’ savage cannons had raged with senseless brutality on the workers who had taken to the streets of Milan to demonstrate and protest against the rising price of bread. The general’s bloody artillery had left dozens dead and hundreds wounded on the city streets: eighty-one and four hundred and fifty, respectively, according to official figures. Then followed a harsh repression against “troublemaking” politicians and journalists: arrests, trials, convictions in one of the bleakest moments in the history of post-unification Italy. “Vivid indignation and pain” were the feelings Giuseppe Mentessi felt at that juncture. The Ferrara painter poured out his upset in a letter sent to Ersilia Majno in the days when political prisoners were being sent to jails. “How murderous, how cretins, how cruel”: in the artist’s mind no other words could find room in front of the torment of those workers to whom he felt so close, the “poor working people resigned, good, patient always.”

Mentessi had been born and raised in Ferrara, in the very center of the city as it turned out a few years ago debunking a critical vulgate that wanted him to be a country painter, but his family knew hard work well: his father was a merchant who had moved from the Apennines of Modena, his mother, on the other hand, came from a lineage of peasants from Ravenna who were content “with polenta for the body and prayerful prayers for the spirit,” as the artist himself recalled in a letter written precisely in 1898 of the Milan riots. Nor could it be said that he was not aware of the sad condition of the Ferrara peasants, since at that time the deepest countryside opened up just past the Este walls. And likewise he was familiar with the Milanese labor movement: he had studied in Milan and returned often for work and to teach at the Brera Academy. Logical, then, that he felt so deeply touched by the crudity of repression, so much so that he was among the few artists willing not to abandon the art of social denunciation in the face of the imposing and ferocious apparatuses put in place by the machine of reaction. And it was in this context that Mentessi matured the idea of painting a picture that would tell that reality again.

For the painter, the attention paid to the humblest workers was nothing new. Some of his masterpieces had already denounced the sad conditions of laborers in the Ferrara countryside. At the first Venice Biennale, which was held in 1895, he had brought Panem Nostrum Quotidianum, a portrait of a peasant woman holding her sleeping daughter in her arms, immersed in a wheat field. And in the days of the Milanese violence, he had painted Lagrime, one of the most heartbreaking paintings of the late nineteenth century: a mother embracing a child who indulges in desperate weeping. For the 1899 Biennale, however, Mentessi wanted to think of something more challenging, more involving, more inclined to a certain Symbolist poetics nourished by a mystical, religious feeling. Apparently the idea had come to him while observing the way the peasants looked at the spade when he called them into his studio to pose: “I don’t know what may be going through their minds, but I look too at that terrible weapon, and it seems to me like a symbol of an ancient pain. For how long has that wonderful and terrible instrument been searching the earth? It seeks for blood, for life, for life that the poor working creature has not.”

Giuseppe Mentessi, Sad Vision (1899; tempera and pastel on plastered cardboard, 139 x 238 cm; Venice, Galleria Internazionale di Ca Pesaro 2018) © Archivio Fotografico - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

There is an echo of this idea in the title of the work Mentessi imagined in those months: Sad Vision, he had called it. The spade, in this vision, became a kind of trait d ’union between heaven and earth. An instrument of the peasants’ labor, but also of their secular ordeal, on a par with the cross that, in the initial ideas, was to be carried by a peasant. It was Marcello Toffanello who discovered, in 1999, a folder of drawings that, together with the painter’s letters, give us a complete view of the creative process that led to the birth of Visione triste. The initial studies depict a peasant leaning on his spade, gaunt and undernourished: the artist’s primal idea was to denounce the problem of pellagra raging in the Po Valley countryside. Then, between July and September 1898, the idea of “superimposing on this realistic representation of the condition of the peasants,” Toffanello writes, “a religious iconography, drawing a cross on the shoulders of the workers bent over the ground,” popped into his mind. At first, the role of the cross-bearer, as mentioned above, was to fall to a peasant, then the idea of entrusting the burden not directly to the worker, but to a mother in the act of embracing her son, in an attempt to lift him from the weight of the wood, became widespread in his intentions. And this is the vision we see in the finished painting.

It is, after all, a very simple painting: it is a countryside, drawn with the stringy brushstrokes of pointillism à la Previati, that becomes an ordeal on which lie some peasants overwhelmed by the weight of their crosses. Central point is the mother, also unable to bear the weight of the instrument of her martyrdom, but more concerned with saving her child. On the right, an elderly peasant is mourned by a woman higher up, while two arms attempt to free the body from the cross. In front, spades spread on the ground and on the horizon the rosy glow of dawn. Yet despite the painting’s apparent immediacy, many critics misunderstood certain elements, as scholar Michele Nani recently recalled: there were even those who, for example, mistook the countryside for a “sea beach.” Others appreciated the content, but demolished the technical rendering, or some gimmicks such as the gloominess to emphasize the desolation of the view, “too mean artifice” according to Mario Morasso. Then there were those who praised this painting fully understanding its meaning. Vittorio Pica, an admirer of Mentessi (in 1903 he would have called him an artist “of feeling” who “made almost each of his works a hymn to love, pain, pity”), understood well who the protagonists of the Ferrara painter’s painting were: “modern men and women. Yes, they are our contemporaries, they are our peers those artisans, those peasants, those women who, in Mentessi’s epic canvas, painfully drag the massive cross of human pain or submit to it along the steep ascent of the Calvary of life.”

In his “peculiar fusion of social realism and mystical symbolism” (so, effectively, has Beatrice Avanzi written), devoid of any rhetoric, and which a few months later would perhaps suggest some ideas to his friend Previati for his Via Crucis, Giuseppe Mentessi wanted to remind the relative that work nourishes but can also be an instrument of torture, that those women and men exhausted under their crosses are women and men living in our time and are closer than we think, that a society can never aspire to be modern if there will continue to be workers who have to carry the weight of a cross.

In 1900, Ada Negri, struck by Visione triste, wrote a poem of the same name inspired by the painting: “Per l’erta ove non trema alito o voce / Penosamente vanno; e ogni di loro / Curva le spalle sotto la sua croce. / L’aria che stagna, immota e densa, in torno, / Ha quel pallor fantastico dei sogni / Che ancora non sembra notte, e non è il giorno.” For the poetess, Mentessi’s is a Michelangeloesque vision open on a turba that has lost almost all human semblance, a turba of unknowns whose names no one will ever know, forgotten, suffocated by a life of hardship. Yet the message is positive, and Ada Negri had intended it. Hope exists even in this sad Vision, and it is entrusted to two elements: the first is the child (“Will He who wins and consoles / Mother, your lily-white child?”), the second is the dawn. Those glimmers could be read as the light of resurrection, the rebirth that awaits the last. A hope, however, that is very earthly, immanent: it is that of a future where there will be better working conditions, guaranteed above all by solidarity. And that was what Giuseppe Mentessi himself expected, in a sort of vaguely Leopardi-like echo: “On this road that leads to our end and that we all take together, each dragging our cross, why can’t we help each other?”

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