LUIGI ARCHINTI
(Milan, 1825 - 1902)
Flora, 1859
Oil on canvas 62x46 cm
Signed and dated lower left "L.Archinti P. 1859"
In the rare pictorial production of Luigi Archinti, writer, novelist and art critic, an excellent talent is evident, noticeable from the very high quality and refinement of his results, not always pursued simply because of his multiple interests.
Actively involved militarily as an Italian soldier in the most important campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century, he was a traveler in France, Holland and England in the 1840s; it is certainly to this latter stay that the pictorial connotation of the work Flora, of evident and splendid Pre-Raphaelite origin, is due. The reference to Windswept by John William Waterhouse would come automatically, if it were not for the fact that Waterhouse's work would only be executed in 1902.
Archinti's great cultural hunger allows him to assimilate with great naturalness the descriptive psychology of the brotherhood of John Everett Millais and Rossetti; the loneliness of the girl/bride holding a bouquet of flowers, captured in the act of moving away from the flowering peach tree that symbolizes rebirth and return to life, leaves open several interpretive possibilities, all however linked to the Pre-Raphaelite and subsequent Symbolist poetics.
The farewell to youth, to lightheartedness, the distance, all feelings dear to Pre-Raphaelite themes, are present in this delightful little canvas.
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