The Angel of Life

The Angel of Life (1894) is one of Segantini's most explicitly symbolic works, depicting a female angelic figure — partly maternal, partly supernatural — in an Alpine tree, cradling or protecting something associated with new life or the life force. By 1894 Segantini's philosophical programme was at its most developed: he had absorbed Indian Vedic cosmology, the pan-animism of his mentor Johann Viktor Widmann, and the Symbolist currents flowing from Belgium and France. The angel does not belong to Christian iconography in any traditional sense; it is a cosmic figure representing the generative force that Segantini saw as operative in all of nature — the same force that drove the peasant woman to nurse her infant, the ewe to feed her lamb, the tree to put forth leaves in spring. The Hungarian National Gallery holds this work alongside other late nineteenth-century European Symbolist pieces. The painting was exhibited at the Vienna Secession and praised by critics as a successful synthesis of northern European Symbolism with Italian divisionist technique. Segantini rejected the idea that the figure was conventionally religious, insisting on its universal, philosophical character.

The angel figure is rendered with the same divisionist technique as the Alpine tree and sky that surround her, making her continuous with nature rather than supernatural in the conventional sense. The warm, golden tones of her figure contrast with the cooler blues of the Alpine sky, identifying her with warmth, life, and generation.