The Vote (Sketch)

Michetti's 'The Vote (Sketch)' of 1882 engages with the fraught political world of post-Unification Italy, where the extension of voting rights and the mechanisms of democratic participation were subjects of intense public debate. A votive offering — the Italian 'voto' can mean both a political vote and a religious vow — was a common practice in southern Italian Catholicism, where ex-votos (painted or sculpted offerings made in fulfillment of a promise to a saint) adorned the walls of churches and shrines. If the subject is a religious vote or vow rather than a political one, it connects to the intense folk religiosity of the Abruzzo that Michetti documented throughout his career. As a sketch, the work preserves the energy and spontaneity of Michetti's first response to the subject, without the elaborate working-up of his major canvases. The National Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina holds this work, reflecting the substantial presence of Italian art in South American collections formed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Italian emigration to Argentina was at its peak.

A sketch by Michetti at his best would show confident, rapid brushwork and bold tonal massing — the essential visual argument captured without the labor of finish. The energetic paint application preserves the physical immediacy that his more finished works can sometimes lose.