Marco Calderini - The Po At Turin (1880)

oil on canvas, 120 x 228 cm

Signed lower left ‘M. Calderini’.

On the back cartouche of the 1880 National Exhibition in Turin

Exhibition: Turin, National Exhibition, 1880

Bibliography: Dizionario dei pittori piemontesi dell'Ottocento, edited by G. L. Marini, Turin 2013, with previous bibliography, pp. 129 - 132.

he Po in Turin, presented at the 1880 National Exhibition in Turin, belongs to the best season of his production. On that occasion, Calderini exhibited nine works and won the Landscape Prize with Morning in July. A few years earlier, Rive del Po in Turin merited purchase by the Turin Civic Museum during the local Promotrice of 1876. At the International Exhibition in Rome in 1883, The Solitary Statues were bought by the National Gallery of Modern Art, while at the National Exhibition in Turin in 1884, the local Modern Art Gallery bought Winter Sadness.

The Po in Turin represents one of his peaks in terms of commitment and size; the optical lucidity is achieved through skilful compositional, perspective and luministic organisation. The spatial depth, clearly and incisively suggested by the vanishing lines of the river, on either side of which the modern buildings of the Piedmontese city are silhouetted, contributes to the absolute rigour of the layout that brings metaphysical atmospheres to mind.