Q126010118

Dated 1915 and now in the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, this oil on canvas was painted during the First World War, the most traumatic historical rupture of Morbelli's later career. The Gallerie d'Italia, one of Italy's major private institutional collections, holds multiple works by Morbelli, testifying to his sustained significance in Italian art history. Works from this period in his career often show an intensification of the meditative, introspective quality that had always characterized his best work — the war context made subjects of aging, solitude, and the passage of time feel more urgent and universal. Morbelli's divisionist technique, at its most refined in the mid-1910s, produced canvases of extraordinary luminous complexity, where the patient accumulation of colored strokes created effects of light that conventional technique could not approach. Without a surviving title, the specific subject of this 1915 canvas is uncertain, but its institutional placement confirms it as a significant work within his late output.

By 1915 Morbelli's divisionist method had reached its maximum refinement. Strokes were small, densely packed, and precisely calibrated in hue to produce the optical mixture effects that defined the technique's ambition. The Milan gallery's collection, seen as a whole, allows the progression of this refinement to be traced across his career.