The next two sections of the exhibition occupy the sumptuous assembly hall, designed to host the Banca Nazionale del Regno d’Italia shareholders’ meetings. It is covered by a wooden ceiling punctuated by twenty-seven coffers decorated with lilies, the city’s emblem, from which hangs a rich chandelier in Murano glass made in 1962.A radical updating of the figurative language, transformed as much in style as in imagery, took place in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The artists furthest from the academic world reconsidered their relationship with nature, immersing themselves in it. This was the moment of painting en plein air and the definitive onset of the high genre portrait, promoted by the ascending middle class.In The Bunch of Jonquils Giuseppe De Nittis worked with a photographic slant, isolating the figure, who is barely sketched in the lower part of the body, in an informal pose seen from behind. He placed her in a two-dimensional space created by the simple juxtaposition of fields of colour, taking up ideas that came to him from Japanese painting, very fashionable in fin de siècle Paris.The female presences of the Turin artist Giacomo Grosso also inhabit the landscape in an informal manner. The small panel depicts them in a moment of everyday life before a sunny landscape. The fashionable clothing and nearby set table place the two young women in a worldly dimension: a conquest for the nineteenth-century middle class and the women of this social stratum.A joyful moment of freedom is depicted rather by Ettore Tito, reflecting on childhood and motherhood away from romantic and realist clichés in a scene on the banks of a lake. The painting conveys a gay and consoling dimension that is very original when placed within the Italian figurative tradition and is largely the key to the painter’s international success.The painting by Pompeo Mariani, an informed interpreter of the belle époque in Lombardy, is more restrained. The portrait of his cousin, Giulia Bianchi, is set in an unspecified corner of the Villa Reale of Monza and painted with full control of the dabs of colour, in an Impressionist manner.
