Véronique Plesch – Solar Musings

At the Maine Arts Journal, we work beautifully as an editorial team, sharing the responsibilities in the preparation of each issue. The process starts with choosing a theme and drafting the description that appears at the end of the current issue to announce the topic for the following one. Since I am an art historian, I tend to be the one in charge of searching for images to accompany this description. As we decided to team up with the L.C. Bates summer show on the topic of Light, I chose to use a photo I took in April 2024 while visiting the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome: Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il sole. I couldn’t think of a better image to capture the theme of light.

This is not the first time I published a work by Pellizza: in the Fall 2022 issue on Community, I opened my Musings with his monumental and celebrated The Fourth Estate. I noted how the streets in his hometown of Volpedo hold reproductions of his paintings so you can see the actual spots where he painted. My visit to Volpedo took place many years ago, in the company of my dear friend Enrico Tallone—a fine press printer heir to a dynasty of printers and artists. Enrico took me to Pellizza’s studio and told me that his grandfather, Cesare, had taught the young artist at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo between 1888 and 1890 (among Cesare’s students was also the futurist Carlo Carrà). There is something extraordinarily vivid about seeing a studio, akin to entering the artist’s mind (as Victor Sabbatini notes in this issue, recounting his visit to Alex Reitman’s working space). Seeing Pellizza’s studio in the company of a descendant of the artist’s teacher made the whole experience even more intimate. This is why encountering Pellizza’s painting in Rome two decades later felt like running into an old acquaintance.

But there was more, for this painting is truly extraordinary. The perfectly square canvas is quite large—a few inches short of five feet on each side—and yet the composition is strikingly simple. Precisely positioned at the top third is a horizon line that divides the picture into sky and land—the latter a shadowy expanse that deepens toward the painting’s bottom edge. At first, one cannot distinguish the house that occupies the middle ground, for we are literally blinded by the rising sun that emerges from the exact center of the horizon line.

Born in 1868, Pellizza was thirty-six years old when he painted Il sole and was only three years away from ending his own life (in 1907, heartbroken by the death of his wife and son, he hanged himself in his studio). When the artist returned to live in his native Volpedo, he began adding “da Volpedo” to his signature as an affirmation of his roots: he came from rich peasant stock, and this painting captures the brilliant morning sun over that countryside. Although this was not the first time he had attempted to depict the sun face-on, this painting holds the distinction of having been sold to the Italian State while the artist was still alive.

As would be expected, the sun is the brightest area in the composition. From this center, we see rays emanating and stretching across the entire surface of the canvas, rendered in short, straight, thin brushstrokes that hold colors from the entire spectrum. Here, the application of paint becomes one with the rays of the sun: the pictorial matter becomes light. This work shows the culmination of Pellizza’s embrace of  what is referred to in Italy as Divisionism (a term coined by Paul Signac), an approach to painting that draws from the optical research of scientists such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, whose findings famously impacted the French Pointillists. While works like Il quarto stato bear witness to his commitment to social themes and Realist subject matter, Il sole represents a different facet of his oeuvre, one in which he explores different moments of the day and tackles quintessential symbols of life through compositions that verge on the abstract. Much like the geometric organization Aurora Scotti Tosini identifies in his other landscapes of this period, Il sole relies on “a single rhythmical structure of diagonals and horizontals.”

I am reminded of other artworks in which the sun’s rays play a fundamental role. This is true of the art produced during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten (who reigned 1353–36 or 1351–34 BCE). Born Amenhotep IV, he changed his name as he instituted the worship of Aten, the sun disk (Akhenaten means “Aten is pleased”). Although his father, Amenhotep III, already held a particular devotion to this deity, the reason for this major shift—often seen as a precursor to monotheism, as Aten was proclaimed the universal god—was political, aimed at diminishing the power of the priests of the solar god Ra. This political maneuver led to the creation of a distinctive, short-lived artistic style referred to as the Amarna period, named after the new capital Akhenaten established and of a new iconography, with the Aten represented as a sun disk with rays ending in human hands, some holding the Ankh (the symbol for “life”). This imagery beautifully expresses the sun’s life-giving force, as we see in this relief from a house altar that shows Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and their three daughters. Here, the pharaoh is about to kiss their eldest, Meritaten, while Nefertiti holds Meketaten and Ankhesenpaaten. Ankhesenpaaten, the youngest, would eventually become the wife of Tutankhamun, who undid Akhenaten’s religious reform and changed his own birth name, Tutankhaten. In this intimate scene, the celestial body hangs directly above, bestowing its gift of life upon the royal family.

In our theme description, we included this ceiling painting of Aurora by the Bolognese artist Guido Reni, created for a garden house behind the Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome. The fresco shows another sun god, Apollo, ushering in the bright daylight as he drives a chariot led by Aurora, surrounded by the Hours, and accompanied by the torch-bearing putto Phosphorus, the Morning Star. Reni’s work perfectly embodies the Baroque interest in capturing fleeting moments and the transience of time.

The theme of Apollo’s chariot reappears in the gardens of Versailles, the palace built to celebrate and affirm the power of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The Basin of Apollo displays gilt sculptures by Jean-Baptiste Tuby that show Apollo emerging from the waters to bring in a new day. It would take days to inventory all the ways in which the ancient sun god is present in the palace. In fact, he is one of the most important figures in Versailles’s absolutist rhetoric. As André Félibien, Louis XIV’s official court historian, wrote in 1674:

Il est bon de remarquer d’abord que comme le Soleil est la Devise du Roy, et que les Poëtes confondent le Soleil & Apolon, Il n’y a rien dans cette superbe Maison qui n’ait raport à cette divinité;

It is worth noting, first and foremost, that as the Sun is the King’s emblem, and poets conflate the Sun and Apollo, there is nothing in this superb house that does not relate to this divinity.

Even before the hunting lodge at Versailles was transformed into the royal palace of the Sun King, when the young Louis was only fourteen years old, he performed the role of Apollo. Clad in sparkling gold silk, he danced in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit (the Royal Ballet of the Night; you can see a recreation here). This ballet de cour illustrated the victory of royal power and the personal triumph of Louis. The action took place across many different settings, from the royal court to the slums of Paris, over a single night from dusk to dawn. At the conclusion, Aurora arrived in a magnificent chariot, chasing the night and heralding the apotheosis of Apollo, the sun god, while affirming, “Le Soleil qui me suit c’est le jeune LOUIS” (“The Sun who follows me is the young LOUIS”).

Not surprisingly, the throne room at Versailles is named the Salon d’Apollon, and the entire palace complex, both buildings and grounds, functions as a setting to celebrate Louis’s absolute monarchy and affirm the parallel between the Sun King and the sun god. The palace is so gigantic that to this day, no single photograph can adequately capture it—only aerial views can, which is mind-boggling if we keep in mind that the first hot air balloon was built by the Montgolfier brothers a century later, at the end of the 18th century!

As the map shows, a central axis runs east-west, following the path of the sun as it travels from Paris, passes through the palace, and sets over the hills in the distance beyond the mile-long Grand Canal. At the exact center of the palace sits the king’s bedroom. The ritual created around the monarch’s daily life is itself a metaphor for his identification with the sun: courtiers attended his Lever and Coucher (in French, the exact same words are used for waking up and going to bed as for the rising and setting of the sun).

The famous Hall of Mirrors is the perfect illustration of the importance of light as a metaphor for the Sun King. Roughly 240 feet long, it is powerfully rectilinear and given rhythm by arches and pilasters. On one side are seventeen large windows, matched by seventeen Venetian mirror panels on the other. At the time, mirrors were exceptionally expensive and Venetian mirrors were the finest; these were the largest of their era, totaling some 400 individual pieces. Each mirrored panel directly faces a window, reflecting and intensifying the rays of the sun. Extensive gilding not only adds to the opulence but, more importantly, further enhances the room’s radiance. The combination of mirrors and windows dissolves the architecture to create an unlimited, illusory space that echoes the solar orb’s magnitude, its refracted light mirroring the far-reaching rays of the King’s own global influence.

In Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of the king—the ultimate example of a state portrait, which I discussed in my Fall 2024 Musings—we see the monarch posing in such a manner that his body, enhanced by his coronation robes, spreads into space, seemingly radiating: his feet form one diagonal, while another, in the opposite direction, is created by his upper body and the axis of his shoulders. This same radiating geometry extends outdoors, where diagonals abound and compellingly allude to the sun’s rays. The palace’s extensive grounds, with their highly manicured Jardins à la Française designed by André Le Nôtre, were created between 1661 and 1668. It was a colossal feat: in yet another display of the monarch’s might, a marshy area was completely transformed as nature was tamed into sheer unnatural perfection.

We might think we have strayed far from where we started this essay, with Pellizza’s countryside—indeed a world away from the abode of a monarch by divine right—and yet, the primordial symbolism held by the sun remains identical: it is the indispensable source of life that returns every morning. In Pellizza’s painting, we see a new dawn over a fertile countryside. It is also a technical tour de force: the avant-garde artist, in Promethean fashion, dares to stare directly into the sun in order to capture its blinding light.

 

References

Benserade, Isaac de. Ballet royal de la nuit. Divisé en quatre Parties, ou quatre Veilles. Et dansé par sa Majesté le 23 fevrier 1653. Paris: Robert Ballard, 1653. (Quote is on page 65; translation mine.)

Félibien, André. Description sommaire du chasteau de Versailles. Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1674. (Quote is on pages 11–12; translation mine.)

Scotti Tosini, Aurora. “Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe,” Grove Art Online, 2003, accessed 1 June 2026.