La femme de Claude, Francesco Mosso's masterpiece: a 19th century feminicide

Immense was the dismay caused, in August 1877, by the news of the death of Francesco Mosso, a talented painter from Turin who had passed away at the age of only twenty-nine. The tone of the obituaries was always the same: who knows what he would have done if fate had allowed him to live longer. Twenty-nine years had been enough to paint a masterpiece. A work on which Mosso had worked for five years, between lightning moments of intense inspiration and long periods of apathy, renunciation, melancholy, despair. A kind of metaphor for his existence, the constant anxiety to achieve success in painting, the tension frustrated by disillusionment, disenchantment, long periods of creative stagnation, lack of motivation. “I know that my life for now is just useless. But I am full of restlessness and bitterness”: so he wrote in the memoirs collected after his death by his painter friend Marco Calderini. A diary filled with confessions to himself, a record of his frustrations, sometimes dreams of happiness. The restlessness of Francesco Mosso’s tormented existence was thus hopelessly reflected in the complex gestation of La femme de Claude, a work known today perhaps only to experts and enthusiasts of the Italian nineteenth century, and to visitors who find it in front of them, an almost unexpected presence, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin. Yet it is a work that can be included among the cornerstones of our 19th century.

Mosso forcibly leads the visitor into the living room of a bourgeois house, where a tragic event has just taken place. An honor killing, one would have said then. A crime of passion, we would have called it until a few years ago. Today we would say a feminicide. Lying on a couch covered with a green floral satin cloth, the same pattern as the fabric covering the walls to make this interior even more oppressive, lies a woman dressed in white, lifeless, killed with a revolver shot. Moved gives strong emphasis to the head, which is raised unnaturally: a trickle of blood runs down the temple, the mouth is still open, the eyes are still open, the gaze is terrified, highlighted by deep dark circles under the eyes. The bare arms are outstretched, the hands also take on an unreal tension. The gold bracelets, as well as the fabrics, the dracaena leaves and the chandelier serve to build context. It is an early essay in veristic painting, taking its cue from a news story, although Francesco Mosso’s is not news: it is more a middle ground between current events and theater. The layout of the painting is theatrical, prescinding from the idea of returning to the relative the aseptic description of a crime scene. If anything, the objects on the floor, the fallen stool and the weapon thrown to the ground serve to tell what happened and to guide the eye to the figure of the woman, to her eyes, positioned at the exact center of the scene, the vanishing point of the perspective lines.

The Turin artist had begun thinking about the work in 1872, set to work soon after, and by 1877 the painting was finished: he had exhibited it at the Turin Promotrice exhibition, raising heated discussion and arousing scandal, not so much because of its content, since the artist was neither unveiling any social remove nor bringing out into the open something that public opinion would not want to hear about, but if anything for the opportunity to give evidence to a black news event through painting, and especially for the idea of doing so with such a raw narrative, so close to the truth, despite the painting’s blatantly scenic construction. Francesco Mosso’s La femme de Claude was hostile to the history painting that was practiced in the Academies, it was hostile to the innocuous and comfortable genre painting, it was hostile to the saloon criticism that sought the “beautiful” in works of art. For these reasons the painting was criticized: these were the same objections that, to take one example, ten years later would also be made against Michele Cammarano’s Partita a briscola, an account of a dramatic and bloody brawl that broke out in a Roman tavern. “Should we reproduce everything that happens in the physical world, any fact, any phenomenon?” This was the question a critic had asked himself in front of Cammarano’s painting. Ten years after Francesco Mosso.

A work of overflowing modernity, then: Mosso had begun to think about it after reading L’Homme-femme by Alexandre Dumas’ son, a pamphlet in which the writer responded to an article by journalist Henri d’Ideville, written while all of Paris was discussing an event that occurred in June 1872. A man, one Arthur Leroy Du Bourg, a wealthy landlord, had gone on trial for killing his wife, who was guilty of cheating on him. The incident had sparked a heated discussion on the issue of women’s rights, perhaps even the first in the history of France. Ideville had initiated the public debate with a piece published in Le Soir on May 15, de 1872, and even with the limitations imposed by the mentality of the time (despite his essentially progressive outlook, Ideville was convinced that women were weaker than men, and therefore more excusable), he argued that the French Civil Code, which did not provide for condemnation for the man responsible for murdering his wife as a result of adultery, was a barbaric law that needed to be reformed. Dumas son responded by stating that a marriage stands on pure, elevated, fruitful love, a love that must be sacred to both man and woman, that the man must be he first blameless so as not to give any excuse to the woman, and that a man who has done everything for his woman, in case of adultery committed by his wife (“the adultery of the man never has the importance and can never have all the consequences of that of the woman,” he wrote in his pamphlet) is justified in killing her, since the adulterous woman in such cases is no longer even a human being, but “a purely animal being,” a guénon, that is, a monkey. “Tue-la,” “kill her”: this is how Dumas son responded to the question raised by Ideville, whether to forgive or punish his adulterous wife. With this cry, which a few years later Zola would call “so bestial, so unjust.” The following year, Dumas, perhaps to give further substance to his own convictions, would write the play La femme de Claude, the story of a frivolous and unfaithful woman, Cesarina, who betrays her hard-working husband Claudius, an arms inventor, and ends up selling her designs to a spy in the pay of a foreign power, forcing Claudius to kill her in the finale.

The title chosen by Mosso, torn as to whether to call her that or The Adulteress, thus served neither to conceal nor to ennoble the subject of his painting: it was, if anything, functional in emphasizing his participation in a discussion that fascinated him. In his memoirs, Mosso summarizes L’Homme-femme, calling it “a very well-made little book, very witty, very elegant, full of communicative eagerness, but rather paradoxical, based very much on the improbable.” The artist, while distancing himself from certain statements by Dumas, had to write that “a fallen woman is always marred, even in her accomplished rehabilitation, a bronze statue with feet of clay she is always liable to fall back at the first blow of passion.” However, Dumas’ conclusions were weak, according to Mosso, who in his memoirs wonders between the lines whether, instead of coming to drastic conclusions, it would not be better to talk about divorce, thus echoing the conclusions Ideville had reached.

La femme de Claude, that painting that the artist imagined after seeing “vibrating in song a beautiful ray of sunshine above an antique sofa, covered with light-colored satin,” as Calderini would recall, should be considered neither as a denunciation, nor as a manifestation of closeness, nor as a chronicle, rather as a kind of intervention by the artist in a debate of vivid topicality. A debate that would soon lead France to adopt a new divorce law in 1884. And despite the polemics of the most backward critics, the modernity of Mosso’s painting was immediately acknowledged: the City of Turin immediately purchased the painting, which was exhibited again three years later. Then, in 1884, one of the greatest artists of the time, Angelo Morbelli, remembered it for his Asfissia, another painting inspired by a news episode, where the protagonist lies inert on the sofa in the same pose as the femme of his colleague who had died seven years earlier. Francesco Mosso was among the pioneers of a new painting.

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