La vanità

La vanità (Vanity, 1897) belongs to Segantini's final Alpine period, when he was living in Maloja in the Upper Engadine at over 1,800 metres altitude. By this point his art had undergone a full transformation from realist observation to a form of Alpine Symbolism — pastoral subjects charged with philosophical meaning drawn from Indian Vedic texts, which he had read in translation. Vanity was a moral category that interested him as the antithesis of the productive, self-abnegating peasant life he celebrated elsewhere. A woman gazing at her own reflection represents distraction from the spiritual and natural order he valorised. The painting was executed with Segantini's fully developed divisionist technique, in which coloured threads of paint are laid over a light ground to create the luminous, sparkling surfaces for which he is known. The Kunsthaus Zürich holds one of the largest public collections of Segantini's work, reflecting Swiss institutional pride in the artist who spent the last decade of his life in their country. Segantini died in September 1899 at the age of forty-one, still at work on his monumental Alpine Triptych for the 1900 Paris Exposition.

The divisionist surface is at its most refined: fine, hair-like strokes of pure colour build form and light simultaneously. The Alpine exterior setting allows full deployment of Segantini's characteristic blue-white light and sharply differentiated colour in snow and sky. The mirror motif introduces a secondary reflective surface that complicates the spatial logic of the painting.