15

With this painting by Tranquillo Cremona, the exhibition allows us to see the female figure as portrayed by the Scapigliatura, the avant-garde movement that originated in Milan and which overturned the rules of academic painting through a veritable revolution in light and colour. Cremona, the undisputed leader of this movement, abandons the precision of drawing to arrive at a visual language characterised by vibrant atmospheres, in which the bodies seem almost to merge with the surrounding space.

The motif of a woman reading ran through nineteenth-century art, but in this work it loses all purely descriptive intent. The female figure emerges from a dark, indistinct background thanks to a soft, warm light that caresses the outline of her face and the pages of the book. The young woman, leaning forward with her eyes cast down upon the text, exudes a gentle melancholy, devoid of ostentation, perhaps reflecting an intellectual dimension that was becoming increasingly central to the female world of the fin de siècle. The extraordinary originality of the work lies in Tranquillo Cremona’s technique, which here has reached its full maturity. The artist eliminates the sharp contours of the figures: the forms break up and dissolve through fluid, airy and almost transparent brushstrokes, leaving the body’s boundaries undefined. There is no clear separation between the dress, the skin tones, the book and the air in the room; everything is rendered as a continuous flow of colour that evokes a sense of indefiniteness and profound psychological resonance.

The Reader thus becomes the emblematic portrait of a state of mind, and the ‘scapigliato’ style of painting proves to be the perfect medium for capturing the intangible: silence, the flow of thoughts and the elusive sensitivity of a refined woman, depicted in the most authentic truth of her intimacy.