The exhibition curated by Niccolò d'Agati with around one hundred public and private works, is organised in collaboration with the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz, the Galleria Civica Segantini in Arco and the Bicocca University, and returns to the public the artist's visions of the landscape-nature as a place of belonging and mysticism.
From his early work linked to the Scapigliatura to his obsessive impulses towards naturalistic Symbolism since he moved to Maloja (1894), Segantini pursued his independent and pioneering visual and chromatic vocabulary.
Also on display are two extraordinary works such as “the Ave Maria on board” (loaned by the St. Moritz Museum), with a mother lightening the load of the small boat full of cattle with the reflection of the waves and “Return from the woods”, where the snow floats in perspective surrounding the cart full of wood and making the peasant woman's effort lighter (a work that hides a painting that was thought to be lost for a century and which required over 5 years of study).
The artist's pictorial gaze forges a human connection with the environment, in an era in which the urgency of rethinking is evident, creating a human communion with the powerful interplay of brushstrokes of color and light where valleys, mountain paths, cows and animals (of the Engadine and the Venetian and Lombard foothills) and reopens the visual lexicon of the inseparable bond between species and environment.
Segantini, the painter of light who anticipated landscape ecology
A central figure in 19th- and 20th-century art, Giovanni Segantini remains an artist difficult to place within canonical categories. His irregular education, nomadic lifestyle, and final decision to retire to high altitude make him an artist who defies labels, yet this very liminal position allows us to understand the innovative power of his gaze today. Born in Arco in 1858 and raised amidst abandonment, orphanages, and small-time jobs, he approached painting through direct observation of Lombard rural life, a world he would always cherish as a source of visual and spiritual truth.
The move to Engadine marked a turning point. In Maloja and then on to the hills surrounding St. Moritz, Segantini intensified his almost ascetic relationship with the Alpine landscape. It was here that he developed the Divisionist technique in a highly personal way: not as a scientific exercise, but as a tool to capture a luminosity he considered "interior," capable of conveying the soul of the mountains and the creatures that inhabit them. The subtle line between realism and symbolism became the hallmark of his paintings, where the natural element was never simply a backdrop, but rather an ethical and metaphysical protagonist.
The choice to live and work above two thousand meters is not a romantic pose. For Segantini, altitude is a laboratory of thought, a place of sensorial and moral regeneration. His most famous works, from the triptych of Nature – Life – Death Subjects such as shepherds, herds, and mountain solitude are born from the idea that nature is a primordial force with which humans must return to dialogue. Today, in the age of climate emergency, that vision seems extraordinarily timely: Segantini doesn't paint a pristine landscape out of nostalgia, but to remind us of the responsibility of human presence within the environment.
His sudden death in Pontresina in 1899 interrupted a still-evolving artistic journey, leaving unfinished projects that would likely have further expanded his visual vocabulary. Yet, that very interruption helped establish him as an Alpine legend: the painter who depicted the mountains not as remote places, but as essential spaces of modernity. The recent rediscovery of his work, supported by Swiss and Italian museums and institutions, confirms the influence of an artist who successfully connected nature, spirituality, and technical innovation with an intensity rarely found in other artists of his time.
