Recently I have become quite interested in the work of Giovanni Segantini, and at the moment I am reading the little book about him by Annie-Paul Quinsac. (I was sent off in this direction by seeing his wonderful L’Angelo della Vita, in the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan.) My attention today was grabbed by an illustration of one of his paintings I had never encountered before. It is a pastoral scene of a row of cows standing by a wooden rail, in an alpine landscape, and tended by three farm workers. As is so often the case with his work the painting is suffused with that wonderfully clear alpine sunshine that he conveys so well. What really set me thinking, however, was the title he gave to the piece….Alla stanga (At the rail).
The aspect of this I found most intriguing was the possibility that we might be looking at a Segantini joke here. After all, the portrait photograph that stands at the front of the book certainly depicts somebody with a great sense of humour. My Italian is still far from brilliant, but it crossed my mind that the title could be translated as At the bar, and that the young woman tending them might be interpreted as a barmaid. I couldn’t get it out of my head that what Segantini was offering us here was a humorous parallel between the leisure activity of human beings and a herd of cows in Switzerland.
On investigation I have come to the conclusion that this is an interpretation too far. My poking about in the dictionary doesn’t allow me to translate stanga as “bar” in the sense I wanted to give it. It has to be, quite simply, a wooden rail. My flight of fancy, seeing this as a Segantini pun, is not crazy, even so. Throughout his work he was determined to show human beings as a part of nature. I suppose that nowhere does this come across more clearly than in what is possibly his most famous piece Le due madri (The two mothers) in which he places a drowsy milkmaid holding her infant in a cowshed, next to a cow and her calf. We need to understood ourselves as belonging to the natural world, he insists, in a view of humanity that is remarkably ahead of its time, anticipating contemporary “green” consciousness.
I don’t really think that we are looking at a joke here, although I do think that Segantini does expect us to see that the cows standing at “the bar” are being served by their human attendants. Humanity, he is insisting, needs to be seen as in the service of nature, and not the other way about. He really was ahead of his time, and I wish his art was more widely known and recognised.