Portrait of Ernesto Redaelli

Ernesto Redaelli (1878-1942), born in the province of Lecco, graduated in engineering, specialized abroad, then joined the established iron and steel family industry "Giuseppe and Fratello Redaelli", founded in the early nineteenth century, who already owns three factories, to which, also thanks to the valid collaboration of his brother, engineer Pietro, he adds a fourth, in Naples. Business thrives even after his death, following an accident, of Pietro, because during the First World War the companies supply material to the army, avoiding imports of steel from abroad. To this intelligent and capable Lombard engineer the Italian drawing industry owes much of the expansion it acquired in the first decades of the century. Given his skills, Ernesto Redaelli plays the role of president in other industries, metallurgical and not. In his will he appoints his wife as heir, but, entering the ranks of industrial benefactors such as Romeo, Campari and Pirelli, he begs her to "provide one and a half million to help charitable institutions", at her discretion. The widow establishes a distribution of the number between different Milanese welfare institutions and assigns 200,000 lire to the Ospedale Maggiore; when Umberto Vittorini declines the commission of the portrait, he also sends to the Quadreria Ospedaliera a "family" portrait of the spouse, made by Vittorio Corcos in 1927. It is the only work of this artist present in the Collections of Ca 'Granda: although evidently still tied to a late-nineteenth-century compositional and pictorial iconography, it is a very pleasant and well-made painting.