ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ponti Art Gallery offers two astonishing orientalist female portraits by Francesco Hayez and Ernesto Fontana, two of most important artists active in Italy in the 19th century.

The small painting by Hayez has a precise iconographic and chronological reference in the series of lithographs titled “Soggetti tratti dall’Ivanhoe, romanzo storico, di Walter Scott, composti e disegnati da Hayez”, published with great success by the Milanese lithography of Giuseppe Vassalli between 1828 and 1829 (Falchetti, in Hayez, 1983, pp. 349-351). The oil, where the sloping nuances of the background evoke the typical nuanced rendering of the lithographic stone, testifies, as observed by Grandesso, although still in an embryonic state, the artist’s interest in the representation of those female figures whose biography or whose allegorical translation would have been imposed, in a few years, as exemplars of the patriotic commitment or of the civil message which, according to the demands of the romantic debate, the figurative arts had to know how to transfuse. Using the brush as if it were a lithographic pencil (contrary to the habits of contemporary painters, who entrusted their inventions to a “translator”, Hayez drew directly on the stone), the painter managed to obtain an image with a nervous chromatic texture and refined, where the preciousness serves to emphasize the details of the costume. As Mazzocca noted, the ideal image of the character was instead rendered by that beautiful “head-air” that has an obvious and appropriate reference in the tradition of 17th century classicism, between the Cleopatras by Reni and the Sibyls by Domenichino. Hayez, however, clearly translated into the vaunted dimension of the literary sphere and sublimated according to the canons of an ideal feminine beauty, seems to resume in the oval of Rebecca the features of Carolina Zucchi, the easy and perfect model whom the painter bound as a lover during the first ten years spent in Milan.

On the other hand, trained at the Accademia di Brera (1855-1863), where he followed the courses of Giuseppe Sogni, Francesco Hayez and Giuseppe Bertini and found as his fellow students some of the early 19th century Lombard paintings such as Tranquillo Cremona, Daniele Ranzoni, Filippo Carcano, Mosè Bianchi, Ernesto Fontana makes his debut on the national artistic scene by painting historical paintings, including “The arrest of Gerolamo Morone” (1860, Milan, Brera Academy), “The last hours of Catherine of Aragon” (1862), and “The meeting of Elisabetta and Maria Stuarda” (1872), awarded in Ferrara in 1875 with a gold medal.

Abandoned historical subjects, he devoted himself mainly to genre scenes, in the wake of Domenico and Gerolamo Induno – considered true cornerstones of anecdotal painting-, whom he is linked by friendship. There are innumerable genre paintings, but also portraits, which decree his success with the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. The taste for anecdotal also derives from the collaboration with important periodicals such as “Nature and Art”, “Lo Spirito folletto”, “The Italian illustration” and “The universal illustration”. His work as a freschist is also in great demand, as it owes him prestigious works entrusted to him by various noble families or the upper class of Milan (Erba, Chiesa, Borghi). In 1873-74 he took part in the national exhibitions in London, a city in which he was very appreciated by collectors. Just the success recorded abroad induces the painter to tack on subjects more attractive to the international market. This is the case of this Odalisque, testimony to a stylistic turn of the Fontana towards the orientalist culture that crossed Italian painting of the late 19th century. In this disturbing and not without malice female figure, emerge the essential features of the Fontana portraiture: compositional harmony, attention to the truth, formal refinement, but also psychological penetration coexist in this canvas, in which we can recognize the painting that, with the title ” In the harem ” (cat., p.74), was exhibited in 1894 at the II Triennial Exhibition of the Academy of Brera, awarded with the gold medal. Bearing witness to the importance that this painting has embodied in the painter’s career, it is worth recalling a second version, today in Bellinzona, in the Canton Ticino, performed years after by the painter shortly before his death, in 1913: one last work to indicate the veneration that the painter himself had for this Odalisque, able to open him the doors to international success.