Picazzo, the mad painter!
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The Fourth Estate - Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1898-1901)
The Fourth Estate is an oil painting on canvas (293×545 cm) by the Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, created between 1898 and 1901 and preserved in the Museo del Novecento in Milan. It depicts a group of laborers marching in protest in a square, presumably the Malaspina square in Volpedo. The progression of the procession is not violent but slow and confident, suggesting an inevitable feeling of victory: Pellizza intended to depict “a mass of people, of laborers of the land, who, intelligent, strong, robust, united, advance like a torrent overcoming every obstacle that stands in the way to reach a place where they find balance.” The meaning of the painting is also highly significant, diverging from those of the previous Ambassadors of Hunger and Torrent: while Pellizza previously aimed to merely illustrate a street demonstration, as seen in other contemporary works (including Nomellini’s The Caricamento Square in Genoa and Longoni’s The Strike Orator), he now intends to celebrate the emergence of the working class, the “fourth estate,” alongside the bourgeoisie.
In the foreground, in front of the protesting crowd, three figures are defined: two men and a woman with a child in her arms. The woman, modeled after Pellizza's wife Teresa, is barefoot and invites the demonstrators to follow her with an eloquent gesture: the sensation of movement is expressed in the numerous folds of her dress. To her right is what is likely the protagonist of the scene, a “man around 35, proud, intelligent, a worker” (as Pellizza himself stated) who, with one hand in his waistband and the other holding his jacket draped over his shoulder, moves with ease, confident in the unity of the procession. To his right is another man who advances silently, thoughtfully, with his jacket falling over his left shoulder. The background formed by the rest of the demonstrators spreads across the frontal plane: the latter look in various directions, suggesting they have full control of the situation. All the peasants make very natural gestures: some carry children in their arms, others shade their eyes from the sun with their hands, and others simply look straight ahead. The figures of the peasants are arranged horizontally, according to the dictates of paratactic composition: this compositional solution, while evoking the classicism of a frieze, also brutally suggests a very realistic situation, such as a street demonstration. In this way, Pellizza harmoniously blends “values referring to ancient classical civilization with modern awareness of the
