The statue at Villa Borghese

The statue at Villa Borghese, painted in 1906 and held by Ca' Pesaro in Venice, shows Pellizza da Volpedo bringing his mature Divisionist technique to bear on one of Rome's most celebrated garden settings. The Villa Borghese, with its classical sculpture and formal gardens, was a landmark of the Grand Tour and continued as a major Roman cultural destination through the early twentieth century. Volpedo's subject here is a sculptural encounter within a landscape context — the relationship between the art object, the garden architecture, and the natural setting around it. This kind of meditation on sculpture within landscape had precedents in academic plein air painting but takes on distinctive qualities through the Divisionist method, where even the cool stone of a classical statue is rendered through warm and cool color vibration. Ca' Pesaro, Venice's museum of modern art, holds important Italian Divisionist holdings that provide essential context for the work.

The challenge of rendering white or light-colored sculpture through Divisionism invites Volpedo to use subtle variations of grey, blue, and warm ochre strokes that vibrate optically into the appearance of stone in varied light. The surrounding garden foliage and sky allow his full range of Divisionist color application. The 1906 technique is at its most assured.