Fiumana

The monumental canvas was painted by Pellizza da Volpedo between 1895 and 1896 and never finished, despite his many revisions and corrections. Included in the Brera collections in 1986 thanks to a donation from the Sprind company, the painting came into being at a pivotal moment in the painter’s artistic career.
The composition, set in the square in front of the Malaspina palace in Volpedo, features a main group of two men and a woman with a baby in their arms in front of a compact crowd that strides behind them on the earthy street. The compositional orchestration and chromatic refinement are enhanced by the pointillist painting technique, which enhances the expressive values and the poignancy of the new values. Moved by the moral urgency to give voice to the working class, Pellizza would represent the same subject a few years later in the painting Quarto Stato, which would later rise to the status of a manifesto of the communist struggle and is still considered a symbol of proletarian social commitment.