Piazza di Dante in Verona

The Piazza di Dante — Verona's central medieval square, named for the Florentine poet who spent time in Verona in exile — was one of the most-painted spaces in Gierymski's Italian series of 1900, combining the medieval civic architecture of the Scaligeri period with the daily life of a modern Italian city still carried on beneath ancient towers. Gierymski was drawn to the square's combination of architectural grandeur and ordinary human activity — the market stalls, the pedestrians, the pigeons — which gave him both monumental structure and the casual flux of modern urban life. The National Museum in Kraków holds this alongside other works from his Italian period as part of its Polish Post-Impressionist collection.

Gierymski renders the Piazza di Dante with the warm luminosity appropriate to Italian afternoon light, using his Impressionist touch to capture the stonework of the medieval buildings and the movement of figures in the square simultaneously. The tall medieval tower anchors the composition vertically against the warm sky.