pictures are very different from his other ones, the ten-
dency did not appear all of a sudden ; his symbolism was
evolved gradually in a series of progressive stages.
Segantini first painted nature pure and simple, with
figures of men and animals. Then he would occasion-
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
ally make his figures represent certain ideas, such as
motherhood, religious devotion, or love, the landscape
harmonising with them so as to bring the idea home to
the spectator with more force. Then he went up into the
Rhaetian Alps and for a time continued to paint nature,
but a very different and wilder nature than that of
Lombardy. The beauty of this nature so captivated him
that the human figures become gradually less important
in his compositions. Then his imagination, always a
vivid one, makes him see strange visions among the
rocks and snows of the Alps. The human figures return,
but they are no longer the peasants and mountaineers of
real life ; they are weird creatures of fancy, representing
abstract thoughts.
His first allegories were those of flowers. Of them
he makes fairy-like figures representing no definite object,
but merely a fantasy of nature. Then his figures become
wilder and more weird yet, and the Alpine scenery
suggests visions of angels. Madonnas, and mysterious
flying women.
Finally he combines the two methods, and paints real
human figures and fantastic allegories together in
the same pictures, the latter materialising the ideas and
thoughts and beliefs of the former.
Sometimes he takes some particular legend for his
subject, as in " The Wicked Mothers " or "The Punish-
ment of Luxury." Or else he will paint a figure
representing nothing but an allegory, in the midst of an
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
Alpine landscape — thus in "The Source of Evil." At the
end he evinces a tendency to return to his older methods,
and in the large Triptych the fantastic element is
somewhat less prominent. Not so, however, his
symbolism, for that tendency is at its height in this work,
which is instinct with allegorical ideas and mysticism.
One of the chief characteristics of Segantini's sym-
bolism is that the natural objects and the scenery are
always thoroughly real : to use a paradox, he is a realist
in his idealism. The study of nature never ceases, but
proceeds apace with the development of his more fan-
tastic ideas. His mountains become ever more grand
in composition and more perfect in technique, his flowers
more decorative, his colouring more brilliant. However
strange and unintelligible his symbols may sometimes
appear, he always paints nature as she is. The great
solitudes and mystic atmosphere of the high Alps,
combined with ideas suggested by books which he had
read but not entirely understood, evoked those weird
imaginings in his brain, and he felt forced to portray
them on his canvas ; but nothing ever distorted his
view of nature. Alpine nature and natural beauties
were ever the main groundwork of his pictures, and
he had thoroughly mastered them in his long residence
among them. It was only in his figures that he let
his fancy run away with him, and he sometimes painted
spectral beings and angels with huge wings. But
even among his figures, only a few were purely fan-
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tastic. Hence it is an error to regard Segantini only
as the painter of fantastic vision. He was a symbolist,
unquestionably, but his symbolism lies in the harmony
of his landscapes and his figures, which together suggest
the abstract idea. Very different is this symbolism from
that of Bocklin. The latter artist frequently indulged
in the wildest flights of fancy, and painted not only
the most monstrous and hideous creatures — Tritons,
satyrs, syrens — but he frequently made his landscapes
utterly unlike anything in nature. Segantini, on the
other hand, was first and foremost a painter of nature,
and he never allowed his symbolism to interfere with
its reality. With him the symbolic tendency was not
a deviation from the true path of artistic development ;
it was not a research after originality for originality's
sake ; nor was it, as it is in the case of many painters,
a cloak for insufficiency of knowledge and weakness of
technique. It was only evolved after mafliy years of
hard and unremitting study of nature, when he had
penetrated into her innermost secrets. After such a
course of training, he could, without danger, sometimes
allow his fancy to take flights. Some of his works of
the last phase have been criticised as impossible and
unreal. Such a stricture on paintings in which Alpine
nature is rendered to perfection, is manifestly an exaggera-
tion. The unreality of the symbol adds a note of poetry
and sentiment to the absolute reality of his landscape.
How did Segantini's allegorical style develop? We
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have seen from many of his writings that an analogous
tendency in his character had begun to appear even before
it began in his art. From his correspondence and
from the writings of his friends we shall attempt to
reconstruct its growth. No part of his work has been
so much discussed as this phase, none more admired
by his devotees, none more criticised by his opponents,
and among the latter must be reckoned some of his
former friends, who regarded this new tendency as
an error.
"When through inexperience in my earliest studies,"
he wrote, " I made an attempt with * II Prode,' I failed ;
but I did not fail irretrievably, for when we are twenty
years old and we are feeling our way for the first time,
a fall is but a form of sport for showing off. The
second attempt of this sort I made ten years ago with my
' Flower of the Alps,' a timid piece of work which only
made me realise my own incapacity. Finally this year
I have striven with greater courage, and sent to Berlin
a picture called ' Luxury ' (which vice I condemn to
the Nirvana of ice and snow) — wingless figures, sorrow-
fully resigned, being wafted about in the empty space
towards the setting sun. This as regards the sense
of form ; the colour is a symphony of blues and whites,
of silver and gold. I am now at work on a picture
of maternity, which I shall call * The Mother Goddess ' ;
it reminds one of the ' Flower,' but there is a dance
of cherubs."
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
Segantini's object as a symbolist was to inculcate
moral ideas by means of his pictures. He did not
accept the theory of art for art's sake, but he strove
after something higher and more noble. Just as he
had tried to inculcate the love of animals by means
of his pictures of men and animals leading the same
life of toil and hardship, and helping each other to bear
their common burden, in his new style he tries to
teach virtue by painting vanity as "The Source of Evil,"
"The Wicked Mothers," and "The Punishment of
Luxury." The purity of his life and his intense
uprightness of character led him to paint with the
object of improving himself and others. A friend wrote
of him to the author "that he regarded his art not
only as a means of showing how his eye saw nature,
but also as a means to make men better, and to produce
in them what religion ought to do in a larger sphere,
i.e., to give joy and consolation, to shed light on darkness,
to give warmth to what is cold, to purify feelings and
passions, removing what is low and degrading and
preserving what is high and noble."
In none of his pictures is there an immoral tendency,
an unwholesome idea. As his life was, such was his
art. " He had great ideas, and he wished to teach
them through his art."
Many of his thoughts and opinions were influenced in
a very marked degree by his reading. He was, as we
have said, a great bibliophile, and he bought a great
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number of books. But his want of education and of
serious mental training made it difficult for him to under-
stand all he read, and he often only partially grasped the
writer's ideas. In some cases they must have been quite
incomprehensible to him. He saw what was picturesque
and poetic in the books he read, and this he tried to
portray by means of his art ; but the ideas were not
always clear to him. A vague vision of misty forms
floating on the wind, of spirits rising from the clefts in
the rocks and from the crevasses of the glaciers, struck
his imagination. Song and legend and story made him
see new variations of the scenes among which he lived.
Here is a passage relating to his symbolism and
characteristic of his occasional lapses into obscurity: —
" Everything starts from the simple, reaches the complex,
and returns again to the simple. We have in our hands
a grain of wheat ; we know that that grain was born
from an ear of corn, and that the ear of corn was born in
its turn from another grain, and thus it is with all
things : the ear of corn is the intermediate beauty, the
spiritual beauty, so to speak ; when it has disappeared
utility reappears multiplied ; hence we can deduce that
the beginning and end of all things is utility."
Segantini's subjects, and above all his treatment of
them, was everything that is most unconventional and
unorthodox. He never painted classical legends and
myths, his nearest approach to a subject of this sort being
a drawing called "The Pagan Goddess," of which, how-
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ever, he never made a picture. Such compositions were
too alien to his nature and to his surroundings to suggest
themselves as suitable. In " The Source of Evil " he
made use of a popular legend, but as a rule his symbols
were inspired by his own imagination or by some purely
abstract idea.
Segantini did not, as we have already remarked,
change his style or his subjects all of a sudden. There
are many features in the new phase which exist also
in his earlier work. The groundwork is essentially
the same. There are the same Alpine panoramas, the
same stately mountain ranges, the same glistening blue
glaciers, as in " Ploughing the Engadine " or in "Spring
Pastures," sometimes a little village with its pointed
steeple, sometimes no sign of human habitation. He
now resorts to snow effects more often than before, and
some of his winter scenes are most wonderfully real and
full of poetic charm. Few painters have attained
Segantini's skill in painting vast expanses of snow.
Although there is but a single tone, with hardly any
accidental details, he succeeds in throwing back his
distances so as to produce an effect of the most palpable
reality.
Another feature which comes to the fore in these
pictures is the great abundance of flowers, and the use
he makes of them as a decorative element ; it is
from them that he derived his first symbolical ideas.
Roses and alpenrosen were his favourites, particularly
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the latter. His trees are very peculiar, and they acquire
an allegorical meaning in many of his compositions —
strange twisted trees, zembra pines, Scotch firs, forming
the most complicated contortions and jumbles of curved
lines, like creatures in torment. He is rather more
lavish in his colouring — the masses of brilliant hues on
the mountains in " Love at the Fountain of Life," and
in the two medallions of the Triptych, are cases in
point — and he now evinces a greater preference for
sunset effects and sharp contrasts of light and shade
than in the works of the Savognino period. He paints
rays of sunlight pouring into black crevices of rock,
glimpses of ice-cold pools reflecting uncanny sights,
bits of bright gold on mountain summits. And over
all he portrays the wonderful Alpine atmosphere, instinct
with life and shimmering with light. Amid these sur-
roundings he places his symbols of life and death, and
of the undying life beyond the grave, of reward and
punishment, of the forgiveness of sins, of the love of
human beings for each other, and of the loves of the
angels. At times they are obscure, not fully under-
stood, perhaps, by the artist himself ; at others they
are clear and human. They are always beautiful.
The note of sadness is, as a rule, not absent in the
work of the last phase. It is there in the " Angel of
Life," a gentle sadness, as in the Brianza work ; in
"The Punishment of Luxury," and in "The Wicked
Mothers," it is a wild, despairing misery, caused by
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the punishment of sin, and by the painful expiation
which alone can lead to forgiveness. It is intense,
poignant sorrow, which only belief in another life can
partially console, in " Sorrow Comforted by Faith," and
in '' The Home-Coming." It is the sadness of the
mystery which envelops our whole existence in the
Triptych — the pageant of birth, life, and death. In a
few pictures, such as "The Child of Love" and "Love
at the Fountain of Life," it is not there, and these are
among the least successful of the artist's compositions.
The religious element now reappears after having
been somewhat in abeyance during the more realistic
period of nature study, but it is of a different
character from that of the " Ave Maria," and of
the other Brianza pictures. The religious feeling of
his earlier work was the simple and unquestioning
belief of the humble contadini, who were the actors
in his pictorial dramas. It was a purely objective
study of religion as he saw it in others. In the
symbolic phase it is an infinitely more ethereal and
subjective faith, the religion in which the artist himself
believed, of the harmony and the eternal laws of Nature,
a dim and undefined, but nevertheless unswerving
confidence in the goodness and greatness of God,
and in a life beyond the grave. Hence there are no
dogmas, no cut-and-dried rules, but a vague aspiration
after something higher and purer than is to be found
in this world. He thoroughly realised the importance
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of religious belief for the masses, and so he tried to
teach it by means of his art. He attributed many of
the evils of society to the absence of it, and he once
said to a friend when speaking of the Milan riots of
1898: "They have taken from the people their religion :
what consolation then is left to the poor ? " Hence
such pictures as " Sorrow comforted by Faith."
The great Triptych too is instinct with religious
feeling, although some of the lunettes in which the
religious idea was to be more clearly portrayed were never
finished, and we can only judge of them by the drawings.
Segantini also intended to paint other pictures of a
religious character, but was prevented from carrying out
his project by death. One of his projects was to paint
a series of works representing scenes from the life of
Christ, but it was never achieved. He made some draw-
ings for the Amsterdam Illustrated Bible, and began a
picture to be called " Christianity " (possibly a part of the
intended series), which likewise remained unfinished.
He felt impelled to portray in a concrete form the ideas
and emotion which nature awoke in him, not merely the
flights of poetic imagination, but the deeper sense of an
unseen Power that works for mysterious ends which it is
not given to mortals to unravel. Gottardo Segantini,
one of the artist's sons, wrote of him that ''his soul
yearned for spiritual purity and for serene freedom; in
body he was sound and strong, his hand absolutely
obedient to the commands of his spirit, and his life, his
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works, and his dreams were all blended together." He
himself wrote that he was tired of the exaggerations of
vulgar realism, and that his spirit was " moving towards
new horizons of art where the ideal rises with the soul
in the midst of green and flowery valleys, filled with
songs of birds and flights of angels grouped harmoni-
ously, who lightly tread on the blades of grass and the
flowers. That is my dream." From the point of view
of his art his religion may be thus divided into three
periods. In the first, he paints religion as he sees it
in others, in the peasants of the Brianza. In the second,
he passes through a phase of purely natural studies and
of nature worship, in which outward religion is somewhat
less prominent. He paints nature in a realistic manner
without giving much thought to the power by whom she
is ruled. But love of nature was too deep for him to
forego for long inquiring into her laws and moving
causes, and from the worship of nature he returns to
religion, but to a higher and more spiritual religion
than before, for it now subjective and not merely
external.
The first sign that Segantini gave of a new direction
in his art is a picture which he called " From a Flower of
the Alps," and which he afterwards changed to " The
Child of Love." He tells the story of how the idea of
the picture came to him, and how it was evolved from
nature into a symbol. Having climbed on to the top-
most ridge of a high peak, when he had almost reached
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the summit he suddenly saw above him a large flower,
beautiful and glorious beyond anything he had ever seen
before. While he was gazing at it lost in wonderment it
changed in his imagination to a fair human form. The
stalk became a curved tree-trunk on which a rose-like
figure of a woman lightly rested, her blond tresses falling
over her shoulders ; she was holding a little smiling child
on her lap. Of this vision he painted his first symbolic
picture. "The Child of Love " is typical of what may
be called Segantini's natural symbolism. From con-
stantly drinking in the beauties of Alpine scenery his
imagination evolved an allegorical idea, at first vague and
hazy, then more definite. This composition is but a new
version of his old motif of motherhood. The strange
twisted tree appears here for the first time. The mother
is seated on one of its branches, her head is bent forward
and she is looking at her child. She is something
between an earthly mother and a Madonna. Her face is
more carefully painted than is usual in Segantini's work,
and it has much charm of expression. But there is in the
figure a suggestion of stoutness which prevents it from
being truly graceful. The hand and arm are somewhat
heavy and clumsy. The child, moreover, has nothing
ethereal about it. It is much too sleek and well fed ; it
is merely a jolly fat baby. The modelling of the arms
and legs is careless and the attitude anything but pretty.
The best part of the picture, as usual, is the landscape,
this time an extremely simple one — just a green fore-
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ground studded with flowers, low hills in the distance,
some cattle and a blue sky. But the grass and flowers
are painted in a most brilliant manner, and form a highly
decorative and attractive milieu for an otherwise un-
satisfactory picture.
The same theme was utilised later in a decorative
panel called "The Angel of Life." Here the idea is
not that of the mother's love for her child, but that of
the Guardian Angel protecting the helpless waif that
has been abandoned by the world. The angel, like the
mother in " The Child of Love," is sitting on a bare
tree trunk ; it is hugging the child closely to its breast as
though to protect it from all harm. The drawing of both
the figures is more delicately executed than in the former
work, and the drapery falls in graceful folds about the
angel. The composition marks a decided improvement on
the first version, the tree, which is more twisted and
gnarled than ever, forming a sort of framework round the
figures. The landscape is delightful, and slightly more
elaborate than in the other. There is the same fore-
ground of flowery meadows ; a small mountain lake is in
the background, and beyond it a low range of dark purple
hills. The general scheme of colour is pale and subdued,
for the picture is painted to look like tapestry ; the colour
is laid on in thin strata, so that in places the canvas is
seen through it. Divisionism and Segantini's peculiar
technique are resorted to only in the painting of the
distant mountains, which is executed with thicker colour.
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
Their deep purple tone stands out well against the pale
sky and the light hazy colouring of the rest of the picture.
It is altogether a more spiritual and truly symbolistic
composition than "The Child of Love." If there is a
defect it is that the figures are too much in the centre,
which gives them a slightly conventional character. But
the effect is pleasing and reposeful.
The next picture in this new style is a little study
called " A Rose Leaf." It is a very simple piece
of work — a girl's head, with round rosy cheeks and
golden hair, and an enigmatical expression, half gentle-
ness and half surprise. The symbol lies not so much
in the painting itself as in the title, and on this point
the artist's friend Vittore Grubicy asked for an explana-
tion, and indeed suggested that he should change it ;
he had not grasped Segantini's new tendency. " I
cannot," replied the artist, " change the name of my
study ' A Rose Leaf ' without destroying its meaning,
for I have intended to portray an impression which I
have, and which always fills me with wonder. When
I pluck the petals from a rose I see in it a little fair-
haired head, rosy-cheeked, plump and round, with an
expression full of sweetness and goodness. If I have not
succeeded in rendering it I shall call it simply ' Study of
a Blonde,' but not ' A Rose-bud.' "
"The Child of Love" and "A Rose-leaf" mark
the beginning of Segantini's symbolism. As yet it
had been merely an attempt, but it now began to develop
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rapidly. Still we should not forget that even in the
period in which he painted his most fantastic and
allegorical subjects, he continued to paint Alpine
scenery without symbolic features. To the end of his
life he combined the study of the real with that of
the ideal. When we divide his art into realistic and
symbolistic phases, it does not mean that after having
painted nothing but realistic pictures, he suddenly
blossomed out into a symbolist, and gave himself up
entirely to fantastic art. The two pictures we have
been describing were both painted while he was at
Savognino, during the same years in which he had
produced "The Return to the Fold" and "Alpine
Pastures." On the other hand, while he was at the
Maloja, and his symbolic compositions were being
discussed in every artistic coterie of Europe, he was
painting such pictures as "Spring Pastures" and "The
Sowe*-," in which no symbolism is apparent. All that
can be said is that the realistic tendency was more
pronounced during the Savognino period, and the
symbolic tendency at the Maloja.
A more fanciful motif is "The Morning Hours."
It is a half-finished study of five fairy-like figures
of maidens with bare arms outstretched and fluttering
drapery on a background of snow mountains. They
are in graceful, airy attitudes, resting on the early
morning breezes and mists. There is a mass of
uncertain lines and patches of colour, and suggestions
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
of objects rather than the objects themselves. Among
Segantini's other better known work this sketch passed
almost unobserved, but it is of interest inasmuch as
it marks a further stage in the evolution of the symbolic
tendency. It is the first study in which purely fantastic
figures are introduced to express an abstract conception.
Another series of works was now begun on the lines
indicated in former pictures, but with a very much
more distinct symbolic tendency. The subject chosen
was that of the punishment of sinful women after death.
The idea was suggested partly by Hindu mythology,
partly by Dante's Divine Comedy, and partly by the
artist's own imagination. The idea of motherhood is once
more brought forward, but it is expressed in a form
very different from that of the "Ave Maria," of "The
Mothers," or of "The Two Mothers." In that series
maternal love in man and beast is portrayed — the mother
watching over her child, the cow over her calf, the
Guardian Angel over the little waif. In the new series
(which is sometimes called " Nirvana "), he paints the
punishment of women whose sin was luxury and who
became barren in consequence, and of those who had
children but neglected and abandoned them. "The
Child of Love" is the apotheosis of fruitfulness ; "The
Punishment of Luxury " represents the penalty of
sterility. In this picture we see the souls of the women
who have sinned whirled about by the ice-cold wind