Angelo Inganni

(Brescia, 1807 - Gussago, 1880)

Signed and dated lower right.

Expertise by Professor Claudio Strinati:
"The very fine painting is signed by Angelo Inganni and is a typical work of his late period, i.e. executed during the the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, when the master, after various and interesting events that developed between Milan and Vienna, dedicated himself with great commitment and fervor to the representation of daily life in the city, with a very happy sense of perspective and with a magnificent attitude towards narrative painting full of figurines always strongly characterized, disseminating his paintings with anecdotes and episodes of every kind that convey the turmoil of a very lively and teeming life as well as could not be done.

From his early youth, to be fair In truth, Inganni had followed this type of approach but over time his style had become more minute and delicate and our painting, under examination here, fully reflects this extreme stylistic turning point. In this work, then, it still feels very vivid the influence, which had been decisive in its first phase, of the great "city painters" belonging to the generation that had preceded him, such as the Piedmontese Giovanni Migliara or the Venetian Giuseppe Canella.

From these artists Inganni draws, in fact, that taste for the urban narrative that characterizes many memorable moments of European painting in the first half of the nineteenth century.

But compared to his predecessors, Inganni has more than ever the right to be considered (like our painting sufficiently demonstrates) the painter par excellence of the lower class and the lower middle class.

In our painting the ones stand next to the others with naturalness and simple spontaneity, but at the same time the artist's eye is amiably involved with the joys and sufferings of everyday life. All set in a very precise perspective structure where the gaze sweeps towards distant horizons that loom over the closed tangle of alleys and small squares.

The area of Milan represented in the painting in question here is the one where the painter practiced for his activity, that around the Church of San Marco, still exists for decades even if profoundly transformed by modern urban planning.
A beautiful testimony of a truly illustrious painter with a work, moreover, perfectly preserved."
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