Angelo Inganni (Brescia, 1807 - Gussago, 1880)
View of the Piazza dei Mercanti or the passage from the Piazza dei Mercanti to the Old Fish Market
Signed and dated lower right.
Expertise by Professor Claudio Strinati:
"This exquisite painting is signed by Angelo Inganni and is a typical work of his late period, executed during the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, when the master, after various interesting events that developed between Milan and Vienna, devoted himself with great commitment and fervor to the representation of daily life in the city, with a delightful sense of perspective and a magnificent aptitude for narrative painting filled with always strongly characterized figures, scattering his paintings with anecdotes and episodes of every kind that convey the tumult of a lively and teeming life as best as possible.
In truth, Inganni had followed this approach from his early youth, but over time his style became more detailed and delicate, and our painting, under consideration here, fully reflects this radical stylistic shift. Furthermore, this work still clearly shows the influence, which had been decisive in his early phase, of the great "city painters" of the generation that preceded him, such as the Piedmontese Giovanni Migliara and the Venetian Giuseppe Canella.
From these artists Inganni draws, precisely, that taste for urban storytelling that characterizes so many memorable moments in European painting of the first half of the nineteenth century.
But compared to his predecessors, Inganni has more than ever the right to be considered (as our painting sufficiently demonstrates) the painter par excellence of the common people and the lower middle class.
In our painting, people stand side by side with naturalness and simple spontaneity, yet at the same time the artist's eye is lovingly drawn to the joys and sorrows of everyday life. All this is set within a highly precise perspective structure where the gaze sweeps toward distant horizons looming over the dense maze of alleys and small squares.
The area of Milan depicted in the painting under examination here is the one where the painter worked for decades, around the Church of San Marco, which still exists today although profoundly transformed by modern urban planning.
A beautiful testimony of a truly distinguished painter with a work, moreover, perfectly preserved."