New researches and experimentations caused the success of pointillist technique in Italy during the second half of the 19th century: forms were seen and reproduced differently and the light was broken up into its many colours.
The painting techniques and innovations moved at the same speed of its content: a major attention to the real made the "social realism" prevail with representation of work and everyday life at the end of the century. The town, following the descent of Risorgimento, showed all its poverty and backwardness, sided by the necessity of an economic conversion to industrialization and the creation of a new working class. This situation offered artists the occasion to develop a new painting style, which could report the circumstances.
The best of this new painting is represented by Amedeo Bocchi’s work On the scaffolding (1906), which shows a new subject: a boy who does not look away from the brushes he is cleaning, instruments of his job; in the background, there is a recognisable landscape: it is Parma, which is showed through a diffused light.
This painting is one of the first works of the renowned artist from Parma. It dominated the Pavilion dedicated to the Fine Arts in Esposizione Agricola e Industriale of Casalmaggiore in 1910. Francesco Marcheselli won the painting in 1807 as shareholder of the Società d'Incoraggiamento agli artisti degli Stati Parmensi. Later, it was offered to the Casalmaggiore municipality in 1936, along with the bequest (1935) including furniture from his pharmacy, which is today reconstructed in a hall of the Diotti Museum.
Marcheselli Fund
