Luigi Cagliani

"Cafe Scene in Venice" French Impressionist Oil Painting with Figures and Bridge

Early 20th Century

Luigi Cagliani was born in Milano in 1910. As an Italian Impressionist who worked in the first half of the 20th century, he was active in Lombardy, which helps explain his penchant for lakeside scenes and also his love to paint scenes set in Venice. In his earlier career, Cagliani appeared as a painter of a clear romantic taste, whom in some way saw himself discordant with the posthumous teachings of Mosè Bianchi. With a modern accent of his own, and on the path of the 19th century modern European impressionists, Cagliani stands out as possessing a dexterous and acute style, softened by an intimate sentiment that envelops the figurative scenes by the use of a complex tonal values, with the prominent use of soft lilac and pink colors, then we find the figures executed with an agile move, as if the viewer was inside of a dream like pictorial composition accomplished with evident precision. Dino Bonardi, a critic involved in the Society of Independent Art in Milan, wrote in 1944 that Cagliani's paintings were "delicate and moving" almost like the feeling of a 19th century romantic style sense. The world of Cagliani’s paintings is achieved in an agile and wavy design, as Bonardi explains: ‘the artist starts from a natural pictorial instinct, from which the dominion of the sign and color moves, but obeys a fantastic evocative power whereby the limits of reality immediately merge and transfigure into dream realities within which the evoked poetic motifs which circulate with sureness of hand and abandonment of vision.’ Cagliani, exhibited at the Ranzini Gallery in Milan, where he presented a collection of paintings that offered a set of visions in which reality was perceived transfigured in the light of an imaginative inspiration. While his form remained bound to the Lombard impressionism style, Cagliani accomplished, with a robust sense of intuition, to grasp the art of painting on a tonal bases substantiated in a refined taste for color. Luigi Cagliani died in 1987.