After Lunch (The Trellis), 1868
Silvestro Lega - Oil on canvas - cm 75 × 93,5
The canvas was painted by Lega in 1868 at Piagentina, the place in the hills around Florence where he had gone to live in 1861 and where many of the other Macchiaioli painters used to gather, drawn by the landscape and the possibility of painting from life. It is one of the artist’s masterpieces, in which he turns an affectionate gaze on a bourgeois and feminine world, taking it as the cue for a splendid representation of the landscape carried out in accordance with the principles of the new theory of the macchia or “blot,” with results of the highest quality.
The myriad hues capturing the sunlight and the cool of the trellis impart a thoroughly natural feel to the stringent, almost Renaissance handling of perspective.
The painting was donated to the Pinacoteca by the Amici di Brera association in 1931.
