Dream and Reality (triptych)

The subject is one the painter repeatedly treated from 1888 on, when he was awarded the Fumagalli Prize at the annual Esposizione di Belle Arti di Brera for The Last Days (Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna), already exhibited in Venice in 1887, and the first of a series of works painted over the following decade on the condition of the elderly inmates of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio rest home in Via della Signora. The rekindling of interest in this subject at the beginning of the new century prompted the painter to set up a studio in the Palazzo Trivulzio, before the home was moved to larger premises on the outskirts of the city in 1910. It was through these studies that Morbelli moved away from the realism of his early social painting to embrace a new sensitivity akin to Symbolism within the sphere of increasingly mature reflection on the scientific principles of Divisionist painting. The result of those years of work was a series of paintings entitled “The Poem of Old Age”, to which the triptych in the Cariplo Collection constitutes an epilogue. In describing the as yet unfinished work to his friend Giuseppe Pellizza in 1904, the painter spoke of a slumbering elderly couple recalling the idyll of their love in a shared dream. The last stage of life is thus reconnected with the youthful years through dreams and memory, and this fleeting continuity, symbolising the cycle of life, is physically indicated by the arabesque of the balustrade, which appears both in the dream vision of the young couple and in the image of the two old people asleep. Already present in the literature of the Decadent movement, the theme of memory as the evocation of a bygone period in life can be regarded as the thread running through the works produced over those years, including I Remember When I Was Young (private collection), exhibited together with five other episodes of the Poem cycle at the 5th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1903.