displeased, when we saw his work for the first time, by
the hard outlines, the comb-like brush strokes ; but after
looking at them for some time their beauties dawn upon
us, and we are fascinated and charmed by those very
peculiarities which we at first regarded as defects.]
" Have I explained myself? It is this ideal which the
artist must find in himself, which the true work of art
should express. All cannot, of course, hope to give to
their work the same degree of feeling. As I have said
before, this is proportionate to the power of the soul and
to the sensitiveness of the nerves which communicate the
emotion to the soul. Instinct, power, will, conquered by
the idea conceived in the soul, obey it and act upon it :
thus by creating a work of art we render our own soul
more noble and perfect, and sometimes that of others
as well.
I 12
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
" Those critics who insist that modern art has made
a too rapid development base themselves on a false
assumption. They think that they already see the roof
of the house when even the building materials are not all
collected. We shall only see the full evolution of art
when social evolution will have come forth from the old
world and cast off its fetters. The first object of every
evolution, social or religious, is the negation of that which
is old, annihilation, destruction. Hence the arts are re-
jected, old ideals and old religions are trampled upon and
mocked, and that is but natural. We can easily observe
how the most potent of evolutions, of which we well know
the phenomena, was born and is now dying — Christianity.
In its fundamental law it rejected science, art, and all
that made life pleasant or even provided intellectual en-
joyments. And what is the consequence? It gave place
to a new art of a nature agreeable to that evolution. . . .
Art dies not ; the feeling for art is in us and is part of
our nature ; it is intimately connected with our passions ;
wherefore whatever discouraged nihilists and materialists,
or ((^classes, or the defeated may say of it, the feeling for
art is indestructible."
[These somewhat peculiar ideas of Segantini's on
religion may appear to be in contradiction with what
he painted and with some of his other writings. His
religious feeling was somewhat in abeyance during
this period of his life. But in any case it was dogmatic
Christianity that he regarded as dying, and not the real
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
religion of Christ, with which he was most thoroughly
imbued. We shall return to this point later.]
" At the present day a universal and popular feeling
for art does not exist. A few solitary artists who create
genuinely personal works may be found scattered in
different parts of the civilised world. These solitary
precursors have a limited number of admirers ; they are
striking personalities, and their art remains highly
aristocratic. There are other artists with a genuine
feeling for art, who produce works that are not sufficiently
harmonious ; they too have their circle of admirers, but
it is limited to their own country, and their works have
no value in the world-wide market. There are others
again who, though possessed with the artistic tempera-
ment, are incapable of expressing it with power ; they
produce weak pictures, faintly suggestive of the artist's
ideal ; often the sentiment which they think they have
communicated to their pictures has remained in them-
selves. Hence they do not understand why the public,
and even their own friends, fail to see it.
"These groups represent the actual condition of
modern art all the world over ; art which does not shed
its light beyond the circle of an association of ideas
and feelings common to a few artists and their admirers.
"As I have said before, it is not an evolution of art
that is developing, but merely the negation of the old.
We have come forth by a revolution from a world whose
ancient institutions were in harmony with its beliefs and
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
ideals, and consequently with the arts ; and we now find
that the latter are unsuited to our tastes, and to our
modern life, so different to the old, especially in the
centres of the highest culture, and we reject old formulas
without having even imagined new ones capable of being
substituted for them and suited to the new life. Whose
fault is it? Nobody's. The new world is still in
gestation. By an optical illusion we who are carried
along by this movement of evolution do not perceive that
movement nor its speed, and we delude ourselves into
believing that we have arrived at our goal, because we
have patched up and overhauled old ideas and old
theories without enthusiasm, without faith in another
more distant goal.
"In the future, when we shall have passed through
the period of material transformation and compromise,
from the new form of society a new and more vital form
of art will be evolved. Literature, music, painting, will
no longer be slaves or prostitutes, but powerful and noble
rulers, and they will form the Trinity of the spirit ; for
them the cosmic evolution will be religion and Muse at
one and the same time, science will be their guide, a high
and serene feeling for nature their fountain of inspiration.
" Of the old ideals some are fallen and some are
falling ; other ideas have arisen or are about to rise ;
hence that retrospective glance, that contemplation of a
past idealism, which was to be the substratum of the new,
has no longer any reason to exist. The thoughts of the
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
artist should turn to the future and extol it. Art should
occupy the vacuum left in us by the decline of religious
feeling ; the art of the future must appear like the science
of the soul, for a work of art is its revelation.
'' As a natural consequence of what I have said again
and again on the feeling for art, and on its practical
realisation, in my opinion the teaching of art is an
absurdity. I do not, however, include drawing under
that heading ; on the contrary, in this most important
element I think that a genuine reform is necessary, in the
sense of making it harmonise with the character of nature
and the needs of art. It should be the means of finding
the living and perceptible form. Of course we can be
taught to paint as we are taught to play a musical
instrument ; but in painting this is outside art, and is
harmful for those who could have dispensed with it. A
conscientious teacher will always strive to teach his pupil
his method of working, and consequently of seeing and
feeling things as he himself sees and feels them. All
true artists understand that what they have learnt from
others, believing it to be right, they forget with difficulty,
and when they find themselves before free nature they
feel that all that they have learnt outside nature does not
correspond to it. And in working they find themselves
confronted with numberless obstacles and doubts which
perplex them and impede them from freely and frankly
expressing their own personality.
"A work of art should be the incarnation of the
ii6
Tin-: axgi;l ov i.ifi:.
7"(> face p. 1 17.
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
ego with nature, and not the incarnation of a third
person with the ego in a conventional nature. The
thoughts of the artist should turn to the clear and
ever fresh sources of nature, who is eternally young,
beautiful, and true. This is the sacred womb of art,
in which ideas are made fruitful and prolific ; it is in
nature that the idea is generated and matured, without
the need of anyone communicating to it that spark
which should quicken the conceptions of the artist.
" Artists are born and not made : the phenomenon
of art is revealed and developed in us, if we already
possess it, but we cannot be inoculated with it.
When we feel the idea of art quickening within us,
and we give to it all our faculties until it be ripe, it
will be as if a flame suddenly warmed and illumined
our soul : the power of this flame is irresistible, and
the work of art is born and full of vitality."
Segantini's private correspondence is replete with
thoughts on his ideals of art. Here, for instance, is
a letter to Signor Alberto Sormani, a young Milanese
art critic and litterateur, who was one of the first to
appreciate our artist's work : —
'* I read your letter again to understand it better,
and I dwelt on the words : ' Art should lead us up
to that spiritual sustenance which is as yet unknown to
the mass of mankind, and which will constitute at once
the delight and the torment of future generations ' ;
this should be explained, to avoid ambiguous interpre-
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GIOVANNI SEGANTLNI
tations, such as were made in the case of Paoletti's
article on Neera's new ideals of art.
" Some days ago I wrote to Neera about her article,
and I closed my letter by expressing the desire for an
art which should contain that mystic love which is the
sustenance of the soul, and which we have inherited
from dying religions. To return to Paoletti's article,
I do not understand the following sentence : ' Should
we not wish, perhaps unconsciously, to condemn art
to follow us in a supreme but unrealisable ideal ?
Should we not wish, perhaps in error, to condemn
ourselves to a sterile and fruitless labour ? ' Further
on he says that art cannot corrupt and deprave. This
is not true : art can corrupt and can elevate our
feelings without ceasing to be art. I shall go further,
and say that art is the most suggestive form for com-
municating to our soul that feeling which is expressed
in works. If we admit freedom in art, I should wish
art to be the mediator between God and our soul ; or
rather, as our soul is, in my opinion, a part of God,
the work of art should be the Divine expression.
Man is but the instrument, thought is the artificer ;
hence we must try to make thought come from a high
sense of beauty, of truth, of goodness, of great human
love ; see that all those highest faculties of love be
transferred into your work, and then we shall have an
art full of the Divine spirit."*
* Unpublished letter communicated by Signora Neera.
ii8
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
Here we see Segantini as a mystic, and as one
yearning for those religious ideals in art which he was
to realise later. It is not the religious sentiment of the
"Ave Maria," or of " A Kiss to the Cross," but it is the
highly subjective religion of " Sorrow Comforted by
Faith," and "The Home-Coming," the outcome of the
symbolist tendency. Sentiment is one of the most
striking and beautiful characteristics of Segantini's
work, and it is natural that it should have formed
the chief subject of his thoughts and writings. To
express noble sentiments by means of art he regarded
as his highest ideal. In a letter to Signora Neera,
an Italian lady novelist of repute, he alludes to and
summarises an essay of his own on this subject : —
" I answer your two questions at once. The article
on sentiment I naturally wrote from an entirely personal
point of view. In the second part my thoughts ran to
your article. I saw the qtiattrocentisti, and my soul
was lost in the sweet dream of an art that was wholly
spiritual. I also saw the Titianists, who, not under-
standing the ideality of feeling, devoted themselves to
the senses, and gave life to the beauty of the human
body, and to powerful and sound colouring. I end
up by exhorting the young, and myself among them,
to follow a complex art, utterly rejecting vulgar and
material realism. Hence no polemics, but battle for
the present, and a new tendency for the future. In a
word, you will see that we are in agreement.
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" I am very glad to hear that your article on
sentiment is only a first instalment, so that my pleasure
at reading it will be renewed by subsequent ones." *
We have once more an expression of Segantini's hatred
for vulgar and sensational realism ; for, although in his
technique, and above all in landscape, he was a realist
in the best sense, he was a true idealist in the general
conception of his work. To this idealism he alludes
again and again. "What would life be without love?"
he asks. "What would nature be if it produced no
flower? Art should be the flower, the life, and the
love of nature. If it does not give us this, it is an
arid desert, a meadow without flowers." j "Truth
without idealism is worth no more than idealism without
truth. The one is the field : the other is the seed.
Let us then sow, and if the seed be good, let us wait
for the spring to come, and then it will bloom." These
sentences undoubtedly give the keynote to all Segantini's
art. The blending of realism with the ideal — that was
his aim, his thought, his life.
In other letters we find opinions on certain particular
forms of art, which are of considerable interest. This is
what he says on portrait painting : —
" You wish to know what I think of your article
on portrait painting ? I think it is well written, but,
to be candid, I disagree with you. Understand, I do
not wish to make any particular criticism, but I merely
* Unpublished letter communicated by Signora Neera.
t Levi's "Giovanni Segantini," p. 31.
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
look at the question from a sound and normal point
of view.
*' You begin by saying that you regard the exagger-
ated importance attributed twenty years ago to the
painter of historical pictures as senseless, and perhaps
twenty years hence you will regard as senseless the
importance now given to the art of the boulevards and
of the drawing-room, and the same will perhaps be said
some day of the genre style, as it is said to-day of
religious art. It is all a question of fashion, and the
importance attached to it, and the favour extended to it
in its development, is turned to ridicule the day on which
we no longer care for this or that kind of art. That
which never changes is the work of artists superior to the
cheap triumphs of fashion, and these men have succeeded
in all ages in creating works that no fashion can destroy.
The true work of art lives by its own means, and not by
those borrowed from the spirit of the moment. By this
I mean, that with any subject, historical, religious,
fantastic, or real, it is possible to create a masterpiece.
"To return to the question of portraits. If we con-
sider the works of all artists, from the greatest to the
most feeble, both in the past and in the present, we
cannot fail to observe that they have all achieved the
highest degree of pictorial force in some portrait. It is
consequently obvious that portrait painting constitutes
the greatest of artistic and pictorial difficulties. The
portrait occupies a very elevated position in the scale of
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
artistic studies, because it is the study of the human
form, and this is how I define it : a portrait is a study
which combines the greatest simplicity of means with
the most effective word of art in the expression of the
living form." *
Although Segantini was not much given to painting
portraits, those which he did paint contain some of his
cleverest work.
Another subject in which he was at one time
interested is that of book illustrations. He himself
occasionally did some, and afterwards he made several
drawings for the Amsterdam Illustrated Bible. In the
following letter he expresses his ideas on this matter,
but they refer more particularly to illustrations for works
of fiction. His ideals are excellent, but hitherto they
have rarely been realised : —
" A few days ago I received the illustrated volume
' Teresa.' Many of the illustrations I liked, especially
those by Mentessi ; but I do not think that the book
is improved by them on the whole ; it would have been
better, in my opinion, to have made a selection of them.
If book illustrations have a raison d'etre, it is that they
should maintain the different types uniformly, character-
ising them in the atmosphere in which they live, defining
their actions so that he who sees the illustrations and reads
the text should feel that he is looking at people whom he
knows intimately. Then the illustrations achieve their
* Letter to Signer Grubicy in P. Levi's " Giovanni Segantini," p. 30.
122
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
object. And I think this object should be, that when
we look at the pictures a month after, or a year, or two
years, or ten, they should reawaken in us the sensations
we felt on reading the book, and reconstruct its sentiment
for us."
The question of illustrations interested Segantini
in an especial way, for his own pictures are eminently
capable of reproduction. They are, in fact, better known
and more generally popular as photographs or black and
whites than in the original.
We have seen from his second article in the Cronaca
cf Arte that he regarded the teaching of art as almost
useless. Hence it is not surprising to find that he held
all academies of art in the profoundest contempt. His
own experience in the Milan Academy was not of a
happy nature ; he learnt but little that was of any use
to him afterwards, he was misunderstood by his teachers,
and he finally left that institution in high dudgeon.
For many years his work was ignored by the Milanese
" R.A.'s " ; then it was combated by them and violently
abused ; finally, when it dawned upon them that Segantini
had achieved a European reputation, they felt ashamed
that nothing should had been done for him in Italy,
and granted him an honorary diploma. But the young
artist returned it to them with thanks, much to their
surprise. In a letter to Signor Grubicy he wrote on
the teaching of art as follows : —
" For some years past the best art critics and the
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
most intelligent connoisseurs are agreed with regard
to the utter uselessness of the high schools of painting
and sculpture, and many have shown what harm they
do. Remember that he who is not born an artist
will never become one ; and then modern art is the
antithesis of the old. The art of the past required
to study the nude, statues, drapery, and the antique,
and for this a school was necessary. But nowadays
a young artist must study in the fields, in the streets,
in the theatres, and in the cafds — and there he does
study. Now I ask you, if you look round the
exhibitions, do you ever find a picture of a classical,
religious, or historical subject by a young artist who
has some talent? Why, then, is so much money
spent? With what result? With no result but that
of doing harm to true art and to humanity, by
producing mediocrities, declasses, and miserable wretches.
You may be sure that if a Giotto were to arise he
would find his Cimabue."
Segantini had a very high opinion of the value and
importance of decorative art and of artistic industries ;
his own career, in fact, had begun with a course of
ornamental drawing. He saw how necessary it was to
raise the general standard of taste among his country-
men, for it had sadly declined since the end of the
Renaissance. There can be no great school of art
unless artistic tastes are developed in every walk of
life, and this can only be obtained by fostering the
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
taste for artistic decoration in the home. As regards
ornament, his theory was that all decorative designs
should be copied from nature. " I am sending you a
few specimens of true ornament," he wrote to Signor
Grubicy. *' I am firmly convinced that a real reform
in drawing is not possible, and would prove of no
value, if it does not proceed directly from the pure
and ever-fresh sources of nature, which are eternally
virgin ; that is the pure spring from which the
exhausted systems should drink, to be regenerated
and made prolific."* We can judge of his practical
skill in putting these ideas into practice by the decora-
tions of the Triptych.
In a letter to Signor Martinelli, the journalist and art
critic, he inveighs against the manner in which artistic
prizes were conferred by public bodies : —
" I have read your article. But I cannot understand
why the decision of the Commission for the Prince
Humbert prizes should have astonished you. To me
it seems quite natural ; in fact, I remember having
said again and again while I was at Milan that this
Commission would provide us with surprises, and, of
course, it has done so ; but how could it be otherwise ?
In art we see the great conservative majority composed
of all the new comers and the mediocrities ; the
nonentities come forward to the first rank. This
trinity is not wanted, but it is thus formed by the
'â– Levi's " Giovanni Segantini," p. 49.
12=;
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
natural instinct of self-preservation and order. The
independent, the solitary, the original form but an
infinitesimal minority, who believe themselves possessed
of the gift of feeling new sensations, and who wish to
reproduce them. They violate, or tend to violate, the
old theoretic laws of art, and to restore the individual
ones ; thus they tend to the destruction of the con-
servatives. But these, strong in their numerical
superiority, drive them back, and hardly ever give
them quarter, thus carrying out their mission of
preservation."*
Segantini thoroughly realised his own artistic
isolation. He felt completely alone from the point of
view of art. He had at that time no pupils, no imitators,
and he was misunderstood by many, and regarded as
merely eccentric. He did not care for public opinion,
but he could not help noticing his loneliness, and some-
times sighed for the sympathy of other artists. " I have
read your article of protest in the Sera,'' he wrote to
a friend ; " I really ought not to care in the least that
Italian art should be in the condition in which it is.
Every time I knock at the door my isolation becomes
ever greater. It seems as though, when I knock, I cause
all those who had hesitatingly approached me to fly ;
and yet all those who share my artistic ideals should
freely and openly gather round me."t
Proceeding with his correspondence, we come to a
=â– = Unpublished letter communicated by Signer Martinelli.
t Unpublished letter communicated by Signora Segantini.
126
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
project for the new facade of the Milan Cathedral. " In
the first place, I admit neither towers, nor steeples, nor
decorative erections. These would be detrimental to
the Duomo itself. The Duomo must remain as it is,
in its beautiful elegance and grandeur, which is what
constitutes the characteristic of this marvellous fane.
Still, I think it is necessary to give up the idea of
reconstructing the facade on its present plan, which is
disproportionately depressed. It is indispensable to
reduce it to a third of its size." [Here follows a rough
sketch-plan, of which the most salient feature is a
portico.] " If the actual plan is adhered to, it will
always be mean, not only because of its depression,
but because of the want of elegance. If the new
design is accepted, we shall have a grand, graceful,
and rich facade, without detracting in any way from
its present beauty. Moreover, we shall have a portico,
which is almost a necessity in a church situated on a
noisy piazza like this."
In his correspondence with Signora Neera he often
sent her fragments of early reminiscences like some of
those we have given in the first chapter. They are very
interesting, as showing the development of his ideas. He
was peculiarly sensitive about their publication, and for a
long time he refused to allow anyone to publish them.
But to Signora Neera he gave many interesting details of
his life. Here are a few specimens : —
" I have received your card and the article, although
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GIOVANNI SEGANTINI
article is not the right word ; I should have called it
rather a study on my art ; and in fact you have grasped
the different feelings and sentiments which have filled me
and dominated my spirit throughout my course of pre-
paration. From the moment I began to know how to lay
the colours on my canvas I was at once occupied with
myself ; that is to say, I tried to reproduce the feelings
which were seething within my soul, filling me with a
giddy intoxication and making me impatient to set them
forth. My spirit was ever in a fevered state ; I felt within
me a desire to love, but I did not know what. It was a
sense of undefined love ; I loved everything and every-
one, but still I felt alone; this gave me a great melancholy
which filled my heart with infinite sweetness. At home I
loved to shut the windows and live in semi-darkness ;
in the evening I would go out and enjoy the harmonious