L'orto dell'artista

In this gossamer view opening onto a panorama that stretches to the far-distant horizon, Morbelli returns to one of his favourite themes, his beloved landscape from his country house at La Colma di Rosignano.
Morbelli’s constant photographic experimentation was responsible for his singular variant of landscape painting, intended to renew the conventional Italian iconography with more direct, expressive images of the authentic face of the countryside. The painting has the immediacy and truth of the snapshot. The subject is familiar, domestic: the vegetable garden, with its full range of greens from the darkest, most intense, to the light blond greens of the fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. The foreground of dense, luxuriant greenery, of a brilliant dark green, directs the eye to the yellow, sun-warmed wall. Here, the simultaneous contrast of colours, the magic rule of Divisionism, is exemplary, paradigmatic. The centre of the painting is taken up with rows of softer greens. The composition is constructed along two diagonals, the light-drenched wall descending towards the right and the foreground diagonal of ascending dark greens. Beyond the wall, a stretch of country in which grass hues fade off into a bluish horizon and flow into the light of the sky. The fragrance of the image shuns rhetoric, any recollection of conventional landscape. The countryside here is alive, we smell its odors and aromas, we feel the breath of air rustling delicately through the vegetation. Here the countryside itself is the protagonist, depicted in a range of tones that are declined in the full gamut of possible variations.