Remembrance of a Journey
Date: 1841
Medium: signed Antonio Muzzi fece; 1841, Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 222 × 153 cm
Framed: 241 × 172 cm
A young man, wrapped in a dark cloak that billows in the sea wind, climbs onto a rock above storm-churned water. He grips his hat in both gloved hands, a red foulard spilling from it, while a small Italian greyhound crouches at his side and looks up, as though about to spring towards him. Behind, lightning splits the sky, and on the horizon a steamship is barely visible, engulfed by the waves. An inscription on a stone at the lower right fixes the moment: Equinozio Aut.le 1840, the autumn equinox of 1840.
This large and previously unpublished canvas is among the finest figure paintings of Antonio Muzzi's early career, and the subject was not invented - it commemorates a real event. When the work was shown at the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1842, among Muzzi's "three life portraits painted in oil, one of which is full-length", the periodical La Farfalla reviewed it at length, gave the painting its title and transcribed the patron's own instructions to the artist: a life-size man fleeing a shipwreck, climbing a rock wrapped in his cloak and holding his hat with a foulard inside, a small greyhound leaping towards him, the date of the equinox inscribed on a stone, a stormy sea lapping at his feet, and in the distance a steamship "struck and almost submerged".
The reviewer praised the head as "excellently drawn" and painted in tones so rich that "you seem to see blood and life" beneath them, and emphasised the portrait's "perfect likeness" to the sitter, which confirms that the protagonist is the patron himself, a survivor of the voyage.
That patron was Severino Bonora, Bologna's foremost collector of art, a constant traveller who assembled a "modern museum" of more than fifty paintings recording true episodes from his own journeys. Muzzi was among his favoured artists, along with with Francesco Hayez, Lipparini, Malatesta, Cocchi and Zanotti - and in 1846 Muzzi painted for him the Portrait of Severino Bonora with Three Young Girls at Pillnitz Castle near Dresden. Bonora's posthumous inventory, in the State Archives of Bologna, records a work by Muzzi titled The Tale of a Journey in the third room of his house, a space given over to the events of his life, where it hung beside Gaetano Serrazanetti's The Illness in the Holy Land. Valued at 250 lire, it was among the most highly appraised pictures in the collection, equal to Alessandro Guardassoni's The Three Arts of the Imagination, now in the collection of Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna, and surpassed only by Hayez's Ruth.
The painting belongs to a decisive moment in Muzzi's career. A pupil of Giovan Battista Frulli and Clemente Alberi, and a collaborator of Giuseppe Bezzuoli in Florence, he had just completed his training at the Bologna Academy, won its Grand Competition for figure drawing in 1840 with Hercules and Cacus, and been elected a voting Academician as a figure painter in 1841. A full-length commission on this scale reflects that rising reputation. He went on to decorate the ceiling of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna between 1851 and 1854 and the curtain of the Teatro di Cento in 1863, and to paint history subjects including Luigi Galvani, who discovered bio electricity, in 1857 at the University of Bologna, and Roma intangibile, of 1888, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna.
With its self-possessed hero facing down the storm, its seascape and the details details of the dog and foulard, Remembrance of a Journey belongs to early Italian Romanticism, casting a modern traveller as a cosmopolitan hero, and serving as a record with a brush with disaster.
We are grateful to Dr Francesca Sinigaglia for her research on this work.