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Ars Mundi (Art World)
Telemaco Signorini (Florence, 18 August 1835-Florence, 10 February 1901)
The agitation hall at San Bonifazio in Florence 1865
oil on canvas
Modern Art Gallery in Ca ' Pesaro, Venice.
The subject depicts a female psychiatric ward of the ancient San Bonifacio hospital in Florence, populated by several agitated women or mentally ill people prey to intense demonstrations of excitement more than living beings. The hermit seems to be shadows from a dark hell bolgia.
An alienate caught while impetuously threatening an invisible interlocutor with her fist raised only she sees.
Another one, on the opposite side of the place, strolls around the room confusedly as if chilling a permanent, estranging thought at the same time.
Other women sleep or scream, others still have an absent and lost look in the vacuum, and one even comes to curl up under a table seeking refuge.
The prospective space finds its escape point outside the picture, precisely to the right, and urges the observer to look at the painting in that particular direction.
Moreover, always from the right comes the light that floods the work homogeneously, as it emerges from the long shadows that profile on the floor.
There is also a wide use of dark and earthy ranges, which thicken in the lower part of the canvas and generate a solid contrast to the bright, almost dazzling, shades of the upper one.
With this chromatic expedient, Signorini wants to underline the dramatic psychic discomfort of the agitates, forced to survive in this cubic area with a gate instead of the door.
The work recalls the scientific method supported by Naturalism: the painter paints the naked and white room without sentimentalism, without any dramatic and emotional participation.
At the same time, the choice of subject has a strong meaning of social denunciation.
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