For Eighty Cents! (Per ottanta centesimi!)

The artwork, which has become almost a symbol of late nineteenth-century Italian painting (particularly of that strand characterized by its commitment to social criticism), takes us to a rice field in the plain between Casale Monferrato and Vercelli, viewed from a low perspective, so much so that on the horizon we do not see the sky, but only a line of trees; the protagonists of the scene are the "mondine" (women who worked in rice cultivation, so called because they weeded the fields in which rice would grow), seen from behind, lined up and all bent over, with water up to their knees, their backs curved and a scarf tightly wrapped around their heads to protect themselves from the sun and from mosquito bites, intent on removing the weeds that grew in the rice fields and could hinder the growth of young rice plants. "Mondatura" (rice weeding) was extremely hard work, typically carried out during the last two months of spring by women of humble social background, who were forced to spend hours bent over in the water and were poorly paid: the title of the painting refers precisely to this situation, since at the time the Piedmontese artist painted the work, the price of rice had collapsed because of a severe economic crisis, and many landowners consequently shifted their financial losses onto labour costs. The technique employed is Divisionism, very similar to French Pointillism: colour is applied to the canvas through dots or filaments of pure colour, whose fusion takes place in the eye of the viewer and recreates the local colour of the figure. The choice to address social themes, however, brings Morbelli’s work much closer to Realism: one may think in particular of The Gleaners by Millet.