Cirano Castelfranchi - The Verziere (Old Milan)

The urban landscape was already a popular subject in the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, but predominantly in an idealized manner. Scenes of city life became typical themes with a more realistic interpretation starting in the 19th century. It's worth remembering how, immediately following the realist movements of the 19th century, the Impressionists also placed great emphasis on the everyday, on everyday life, with a certain predilection, however, for the frenetic pace of the city, its crowds, traffic, and typically bourgeois settings. In Castelfranchi's Milanese views, as in the present work, the quotidian aspect prevails, the frank and sincere realism of everyday life in a city setting.

Cirano Castelfranchi's works reveal the artist's post-Impressionist maturity. The composition is compressed entirely into the foreground, allowing no spatial depth. The painter's aim is not to capture the sensory aspect of the subject, but to capture its very essence, its substance. To this end, the brushstroke, rich in texture, intervenes, fleshing out the objects, breaking them down into different planes, recording the vibrations of light and life within them. The sensory aspect, therefore, is completely transcended in a complex conception of pictorial practice in which the artist's gestures themselves play a fundamental role. We also find in Castelfranchi a certain tendency to structure things according to geometric principles that hark back to Cézanne. Chromatically, the entire surface of the work is harmonized with a balanced palette of references and correspondences.

Cirano Castelfranchi was born in Genoa on July 2, 1912, but has always lived in Milan. He is a self-taught painter in oils and watercolors. He attended the Brera School of Drawing. From 1934 onwards, he exhibited in regional and national exhibitions, and in 1942 he received an award at the Italian Painters in Arms exhibition in Palermo. His works are held in private collections in Italy and abroad, including New York, Paris, and London. In 1934, he produced a series of panels with views of Milan.

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