Maternal joys – Daily family life by Gaetano Chierici

A great nineteenth-century author – told to us by Phidias Antiques – through a masterpiece now on display at Palazzo Martinengo, Brescia.

Gaetano Chierici's work began in the years 1851-1852 when he attended the School of Fine Arts in Reggio Emilia and, subsequently, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Modena where he already showed off his ability in the representations of the human body.

Subsequently, the artist's presence was recorded at the School of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence during the period of the innovative experience of the Macchiaioli which took place in Tuscany and beyond. In the visual, composed of areas of color, between light and chiaroscuro, it favors the immediacy of the painting.
During the Sixties his art was also expressed through admirable self-portraits or strong portraits for expressive and introspective investigations, but from here Chierici's theme changed radically and his figurative path addressed other themes: cloisters or landscapes populated by religious figures.

In the years around 1865, his idyllic interpretation of reality turns to stories of humble events described with great detail and a sense of drama. Contrary to the radical and profound break with the academic tradition, in him, on the contrary, in his image and style with certain seventeenth-eighteenth century experiences (not only Italy, those seventeenth-century Flanders, but above all the Dutch, with their romantic recoveries of the most diverse moments of figurative history) aroused much interest. Probably the artist from Reggio Emilia was not only fascinated by a sort of search for a thousand details and exact definitions of objects, but also by the diffusion of light that smoothes shapes and models spaces through subtle tonal transitions, a characteristic that later became a trait distinctive.

Initially, his “idyllic, smiling, adorable idea of ​​the life of the poor” led him to images of more general descriptive content.
In 1869 he presented the work at the Brera Academy Mask, exhibited together with A serious problem, a personal taste that gives his subjects an unmistakable affectionate sympathy.
Starting from the 1870s, the stylistic signature of the artist from Reggio Emilia rapidly evolved into works that explained the family's daily life with unmistakable figurative fantasies. Chierici arrives at a definition of the typical schemes of his painting of family interiors, which apparently does not subsequently undergo substantial changes; in reality he refined himself with an almost maniacal descriptive intelligence, according to long-meditated schemes, developing in the following years until he reached the peaks of a painting that no longer has anything conventional.

Chierici begins to paint an apparent chaos of things and objects, with a rigid mental order, and a descriptive intellect frantically concerned with a thousand details. Each painting is made up of a series of "still lifes", in the interiors of those rustic houses with children and teenagers, with lights and shadows, old crumbling walls, majestic fireplaces still so familiar to our eyes, always similar but revolving or rotated to something else angles, interpreted as balanced compositional cuts, framing between terracotta floors, carvings everywhere, precise rectangles and even polygonal geometries, the design grid of the bricks will become its expressive acronym one of the words. Finally there is the colour, the high notes are subtly calibrated with sensitivity to revive the brown and earthy tones of the basses, the delicate pink of the poor clothes, the blue of the apron to shine, the bright red of the skirts, feeling a deep feeling towards the world. The elegant pictorial quality is expressed in the fresh brushstrokes, delicate rhythm and colors of the figures; inconspicuous everyday objects become poetic and stylistic themes, close to abstraction in the perfection in which they are rendered.

A painting of nuanced artisanal quality, clearly devoid of intellectual filters, interspersed with expressions of modesty and everyday domestic reality, expressed with descriptive integrity in the simultaneity of several moments in chronological order.

In the following decade, stylistic studies continued to refine themselves to the point of eliminating any conventional form of representation in which figurative inventions more profoundly renewed the subject and context of the work; during this period he created his paintings of the highest quality, both in terms of creative richness and wonderfully descriptive nature.
The imprint is anecdotal realism that ignores the lyrical and atmospheric aspects of reality to envelop an image that has its origins as a careful study of truth but seems to have been wisely and happily researched in the studio. Its charm comes from the individual details, its lenticular precision is autonomous and aimed at achieving an overall balance of shape.

The famous A frightening state of affairs it was sent by the artist to Florence to the merchant Spranger, who in turn sent it to London, to the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1881, demonstrating the great success and notoriety of our artist, now of international scope.
Chierici worked tirelessly until the beginning of the twentieth century, when he completed his last works, not a tired or repetitive work as one might imagine, but a happy continuation of the works of previous years, expressing it to the end in this happy look at life.

The painting is currently on display at the exhibition “Women in art – From Titian to Boldini” at Palazzo Martinengo in Brescia, from 22 January to 12 June 2022.