Mercato di notte

The work shows a small crowd gathered round a stand. The salesman, in the foreground, is talking to the shoppers, who form a circle interrupted only in the foreground, as if to emphasize the presence of the salesman, a dark figure standing out against the fully illuminated surface of the stand.
When compared with the earlier Veduta di Valleranno, this picture, painted in 1938, clearly reveals the progress made by Ziveri from a harmonically composed tonalism to a rougher and more dramatic vision of things, in which Goya’s lesson is directly referred to, between crude lights and threatening obscurities.
At the same time the pictorial material has become denser and more corporal, so that the summary rapidity of the representation is endowed with a powerful presence. The thoughts Ziveri has directed towards Goya find full expression in this painting.