Portrait of Mrs. Luvoni
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Its present location is not specified in available sources |
| Location History: | The documented history of the location of Portrait of Mrs. Luvoni goes back to 1934 when it was exhibited as La Signora Luvoni in the Mostra Internazionale del Ritratto del secolo XIX in the XIX Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Venezia. At the time of this exhibition the painting was in the possession of Anna Maria Turri Gallina of Milan, who had also acquired Ranzoni's La Signorina Cagnoli, which was next in the archival sequence (number 382 and 383). The connection between the Turri and the Gallina family adds a further layer of significance to the painting, since Anna Maria was a daughter of the lawyer and parliamentarian Giacinto Gallina, whose collection included paintings by the Scapigliatura movement; her father and brother, the stewardship of the works, ensured their preservation at least up to the early 1930s. It is almost certain that the sitter is Giuseppina Lorioli, the wife of Luigi Luvoni, an intimate acquaintance of Ranzoni's who was a Milanese engineer, painter and art collector whose portrait is also by Tranquillo Cremona, and is now in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. It is very possible that the portrait was commissioned or given after the meeting of Ranzoni and Luigi Luvini at the Brera Academy where both the painter was a student of Cremona. Aside from the 1934 Biennale and the ownership of the Turri Gallina, there is no indication of where the painting is currently located, and Ranzoni's works are seldom found in public museums, offering the possibility that Portrait of Mrs. Luvoni was in private hands in Italy or that it passed through the art market without a public sale. |
Portrait of Mrs Luvoni is an expression of the unique style of the Scapigliatura, the Italian avant-garde movement which was radicalizing the academic rules in the decades after the unification of the Italian States. A major player in this Milanese group, Ranzoni's painting was defined by “vibrant splashes of colour that are not drawn out on the canvas” (as described in one source). This portrait is rendered in a way that doesn't rely on sharp lines or edges, but instead on subtle shifts in tone, creating a sense of being both figure and atmosphere. This portrait is introspective and gentle, typical of Ranzoni's best-known female portraits. The surfaces in his brushwork, “filamentous and frayed,” appear to resonate with a veiled radiance. The faces are treated with special care, the clothing and hair in a freer and more flowing manner. The overall impression is of psychological depth, rather than simply physical resemblance: Ranzoni's work was distinguished from his contemporaries, as even those critics who were sympathetic expressed, because it resisted the “sentimentalism and virtuosity” which befell others in the movement. Ranzoni’s portraits of women hold a special place in his oeuvre. One of them describes them as having a “suffering melancholy without ostentation, and full of sweet interiority”. The Portrait of Mrs Luvoni is a prime example: the sitter may be there, but she is also always present and affectionately absent, her body merging in and out with the surrounding light. In 1934, the portrait was shown at the XIX Venice Biennale, in an exhibition of 19th-century portraiture. His paintings of this period, especially from 1885 to his death in 1889, are among the most evocative of the late nineteenth century, as "abstract creations" in which the paint has been reduced to its minimum and the colours to two tones. This last and most extreme phase can be seen in a portrait of Mrs Luvoni, which predates it.
Sources: