Girl with a flower

Although he was born in the province of Mantua, Ripari found artistic inspiration and became fairly well-known in Milan, where he developed his art working together with the painters’ movement called Scapigliatura - its most important representatives were Tranquillo Cremona and Daniele Ranzoni.
The distinguishing characteristics of Ripari’s art are an accentuated sensibility that is sublimated in the art of portraits, a dense brushwork and the tendency to use dark tones and shades of black, though illuminated by sudden blots of white and made gentle by the use of chiaroscuro that delimits the faces with intensity.
In this canvas the figure of the young man who appears, dressed in dark clothes, against a background that is also dark, is in a certain sense reminiscent of the works by Antonio Manicini. There is an interesting dialogue between the meditative aspect of the character and the blossoming flower, which evidently alludes to the young age of the man in the picture.