Lorenzo Delleani (Pollone di Biella 1840 - Turin 1908)

Lorenzo Delleani (Pollone di Biella 1840 – Turin 1908), in the first part of his artistic career, went through a period of historical and genre painting in an anachronistic late-Romantic language. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, however, his style underwent an unexpected transformation. He adopted the style of painting in patches (macchie) of sharply contrasting colour, moving in the same direction as the most important Italian artists of the day, the Macchiaioli. This mutation stemmed from trips to London and Paris in 1873 and 1874, and probably another stay in Paris in 1878. His 1882 rendering of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, which he saw in the Louvre, testifies to his renewed creative energy.
From then on Delleani played a significant role in the renovation of Italian landscape painting, now liberated from the need for celebration or rhetoric and inclined to immerse the viewer’s gaze in the rich, material, intense presence of nature.