Scuola lombarda (XIX) - Romeo e Giulietta

Lombard School, 19th century
Romeo and Juliet
Oil on canvas, 64 x 52 cm – With frame, 73 x 61 cm

The oil painting on canvas of this type fits into the thread of literary subject painting so loved by Lombard figurative culture in the 1800s, which found in Shakespeare's drama Romeo and Juliet an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The depicted scene captures the moment of farewell or the furtive meeting between the two Verona lovers, set on a loggia lined with late Gothic arches and a stone balustrade that opens the view to a hilly landscape bathed in crepuscular light. The young man, wrapped in a scarlet cloak, bends toward the kneeling girl, caught in the act of embracing him with transport: a gesture that, in a single photographic frame, condenses the emotional tension of the Shakespearean text, suspended between the joy of union and the foreboding of imminent separation. The golden dress with wide shifting folds, enriched by embroidery and the white underdress that falls in a cascade, reveals a scenographic taste attentive to the material rendering of fabrics, while the elaborated hairstyle and the beaded veil of the woman recall an nineteenth-century rereading of Renaissance costume, filtered through the Romantic taste for historical settings. Stylistically, the work sits in the path of Lombard classicism which, between Restoration and early Romanticism, saw painters like Francesco Hayez as protagonists capable of marrying the solidity of academic drawing with a new narrative and sentimental sensitivity. The soft brushwork, the restrained chiaroscuro that models the faces with a delicately almost porcelain-like light, and the almost miniature attention to decorative details of the garments are features typical of the Milanese school formed under the Brera Academy’s teaching, where the recovery of the sixteenth-century Venetian tradition merged with a renewed interest in historical and literary subjects, dear to the middle-class audience of the time. The architectural construction in the background, with its columns and richly worked capitals, serves not only a scenographic function but also a symbolic one, framing the lovers’ love within a space suspended between historical reality and theatrical invention, according to a compositional convention recurring in Lombard history painting of the period. The result is a work of great formal balance, capable of elegantly conveying the pathos of the Shakespearean tale, transforming a famous literary subject into an occasion for refined painting experimentation, in line with the cultured and sentimental taste of Lombard nineteenth-century commissions, ever more attracted to the great themes of love and tragic destiny narrated by European literature.

The frame is provided as a gift, consequently it cannot be a reason for return or complaint.

For paintings purchased abroad: after payment, the procedure to obtain the export license (ALC) will be started. All antique pieces sent abroad from Italy require this document, issued by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. The procedure could take 3 to 5 weeks from the request, therefore, as soon as we have the document the painting will be shipped.