Children with bagpipe

Bagpipe players were among the most recognisable figures of southern Italian folk culture transplanted into northern Italian cities. Zampognari — shepherds from Calabria, Basilicata, or Abruzzo — traditionally came to Rome and other cities during the Advent season to play at street shrines and in church porticos, becoming familiar seasonal presences in urban life. Gerolamo Induno's 1872 painting of children with a bagpipe suggests either a playful genre scene of children imitating adult musicians or a depiction of young zampognari themselves learning the tradition. The subject combines his interest in childhood subjects — which he shared with many Italian Romantic painters — with his documentary attention to folk instrument and costume. Children were also symbolically charged figures in Risorgimento imagery: the generation that would inherit the unified Italy. By the early 1870s such folk subjects carried a nostalgic quality, as industrialisation and urbanisation were already beginning to erode the traditional practices they depicted.

Children's genre subjects in Induno's practice tend toward a slightly lighter, warmer palette than his military or grief subjects. The bagpipe as a compositional element introduces a distinctive irregular form that required careful observation — the bag, the chanter, the drones each have specific shapes and surface textures. His handling of children's skin tones employs higher-key, pinker flesh values than his adult figures, and their clothing is typically rendered in bright, simple colours.