Luigi Serena (1855 - 1911) Lady with a Fan, 1895-1900 Oil on canvas 56.2 x 46.3 cm Signature: 'LSerena' on the front Other inscriptions: on the back of the frame, references to an auction passage in white chalk, barely legible Distinguishing features: on the verso label 'I A library', referring to a previous location, and label with reference to the bank's inventory Provenance: Martinazzo Art Gallery, Montebelluna; Banca Popolare di Asolo e Montebelluna; Veneto Banca Holding; Veneto Banca SpA in LCA Bibliography: O. Stefani, "Luigi Serena 1855-1911", Ponzano Veneto, 2006, p. 119, 147, table 111 Certificates: Photo-certificate by Ottorino Stefani dated 2 April 1999 Conservation status. Support: 85% (reintelo) Conservation status. Surface: 85% (colour falls and retouches, scattered) Luigi Serena, the painter of choice of the Trevisan bourgeoisie at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, had no direct pupils, but was admired by younger artists for his bohemian and anti-bourgeois spirit, also as a moral reference point, becoming a milestone on the artistic horizon of the Marca. It was the avant-garde artists, led by Arturo Martini, who promoted Serena's posthumous exhibition shortly after his death in 1911. Although he worked mainly in the province, the artist successfully participated in the most important exhibitions of the time: in Venice (1881), Milan (1883), Turin (1884), Florence (1886), Paris (1888) and Munich (1890). He was among those invited to the 1897 Venice Biennale (Eugenio Manzato, 'Treviso', in 'La Pittura in Italia. L'Ottocento', Milan, 1990, p. 213). As Ottorino Stefani observes in the certifying note, "the Portrait of a Lady belongs to the period of Luigi Serena's full artistic maturity (1895-1900), an acute interpreter of the subject's psychological traits and personality, revealing a strong-willed character. On a strictly pictorial level, the work stands out for the extraordinary strength of its colours: the pink of the complexion, the silvery white and the black, enhanced by the fan and the red background reminiscent of ancient Pompeian paintings", in consonance with Serena's colour choices at the end of the century, in particular the relationship between white, grey and black (crf. "Donna che prega", 1897-1898, in Ottorino Stefani, ed. 1855-1911", Ponzano Veneto, 2006, p. 99, table 70). In the specialist's opinion, the painting - so close to Pompeo Molmenti's lesson, exemplified in the "Portrait of a Young Lady" at Ca' Pesaro - is "one of the high points of the Montebellunese painter's entire artistic career". And indeed, among "the female portraits, Lady with a Fan appears as a tribute to the great portraiture of Venetian painting from its origins, especially for the bold compositional and chromatic approach, which finds a subtle correspondence in the volitional and narcissistic expression of the face. Here, the artist from Montebelluna truly showed himself particularly attracted to the inspirational motif above all as a 'system' of signs and colours that contain an evocative aesthetic message: that is, we are in the sphere of an art for which 'form' becomes 'self-signifying' in that it exalts 'decorative values' capable of resisting over time even in the face of the inevitable turns of taste and predominant fashions of a given civilisation" (ibid., p. 119).