Portrait of Gina Caccia (the green necklace)

The work belongs to the period of Giovanni Carnovali's, known as Il Piccio ("the Little One"), full artistic maturity (the decade 1860–1870). During these years he was welcomed by members of the liberal bourgeoisie of Bergamo as their preferred family portraitist: the women he portrayed thus gave the artist the freedom to experiment with a new style of painting based on "dissolving" forms, made entirely of light and colour, anticipating both the Scapigliatura movement and the luminous impressions of French painting. In this context emerged the remarkable "optical" masterpiece that is the Portrait of Gina Caccia: the young woman's instinctive gesture of raising her hand to shield her eyes from the sun became, for Piccio, an opportunity to "transcribe" a score of light. The sunlight envelops the young woman, softening the contours of her figure, and interacts with the colour, altering its temperature in the shadow cast by her hand across her face, while making the green beads of her necklace shimmer with iridescent reflections, a detail that, not by chance, inspired an evocative alternative title for the painting. Described as eccentric and restless, Carnovali always maintained a distinctive and original style: he was one of the few Italian Romantic painters to convey emotion on canvas with genuine spontaneity, without yielding to the influence of contemporary artistic movements. His loose brushwork, composed of strokes and patches of colour, always retained a strong sense of realism and is capable of communicating images directly to the viewer's consciousness. Among the most significant artists of the nineteenth century, Il Piccio was perhaps the first interpreter of a modern style of painting, one that would eventually lead to the Scapigliatura and Divisionism, distinguished by its originality and nonconformist character: for this reason, he was not appreciated by his contemporaries, who often considered him either too old-fashioned or too modern. In his own time, the classical nature of his subjects was no longer admired, and his use of the non-finito technique appeared, in the eyes of his contemporaries, to be an affront to "good painting".