Joseph Mentessi

(Ferrara 1857 – Milan 1931)

Panem nostrum quotidianum, 1894-95

Oil on canvas, 107.5 x 115.5 cm
Museum of the Nineteenth Century, inv. 50

The first Brera Triennale in 1891 marked the establishment of social themes in art. Ferrara painter Giuseppe Mentessi adhered to this poetics and remained faithful to it for the next two decades, producing works such as Panem nostrum quotidianum, icon of social engagement painting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a manifesto denouncing the peasant condition in the Po Valley countryside. The canvas depicts a sad and suffering-looking young mother with her sick daughter in her arms, surrounded up to her shoulders by lush corn plants that seem to oppress her. The extreme simplicity of the image is matched by a similar essentiality of painterly means: broad, full-bodied brown brushstrokes hew out the protagonists, who emerge from the yellow ochre background of the field and stand out against the light blue of the sky. The painting refers to the spreading in the Ferrara countryside of pellagra, a disease of malnutrition due to the reduction of the peasants’ diet to corn derivatives alone, attributable to the intensive exploitation of laborers and the worsening of their living conditions. Mentessi presented the painting at the first Venice Biennale in 1895 and then kept it close to himself until his death.