The Meditation

A female figure, looking sad and straight at the viewer, with her white dress uncovering her breast, is a symbolic image of Meditation or Melancholy. The Venetian painter, in this work, represents the disappointment at the failure of the Risorgimento uprisings of 1848. Indeed, in the explicit message engraved on the spine of the book, which bears the title "Storia d'Italia" (History of Italy), the aspirations of the young generations who had fought and fallen in the name of freedom and independence are in fact consumed. The dates of the Five Days of Milan, shown on the black wood of the cross, the symbol of martyrdom, reflect the patriotic sentiment of Francesco Hayez (1791-1882), who experienced the insurrectionary uprisings firsthand and forged links with the liberal aristocracy. It was from Count Giacomo Franco of Verona, that Achille Forti bought the canvas; the second version of the "Meditation" he had painted a year earlier for the poet Andrea Maffei. The work marked a turning point in Hayez's painting: the tragic epilogue of the events of 1848 in Milan, in which the painter had personally experienced, imposed a different awareness on the historical genre and caused a crisis in the allusive imagery of the civil painting of previous years. Since the representation of contemporary events was not feasible, Hayez preferred to abandon the historical genre and transfer its political value to an iconography that echoed that of the "Melancholy", painted at the beginning of the fifth decade of the 19th century, transforming its existential torment in "The Meditation", into a moving political metaphor of the first great and general disappointment of the Risorgimento. In this version, he departs from the clear formal purism to achieve an effect of greater intensity and expressiveness, accentuated by the more pronounced looming figure, whose carnality stands out against the background, in a close-up, concentrating the emotion in the face in shadow.