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The Alpine Triptych, 1898 – Giovanni Segantini – Saint Moritz
On permanent loan from the Foundation for Art, Culture and History, Winterthur
For the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, Giovanni Segantini planned a colossal panorama of the Engadine, a painted panoramic view extending from the Bernina to the Albula massifs. However, the project had to be abandoned due to the high costs. The composition finally ended up as what became known as the Alpine Triptych, a masterpiece that not only depicts the three fundamental concerns of man’s existence: life, nature, and death, but also holds a profound symbolic value.
With his majestic triptych, executed at the end of the 19th century, Giovanni Segantini created one of the last meaningful programmatic pictures of the era. It depicts human existence in perfect harmony with nature. Its simple, rural figures are embedded in the transition between day and night, in the perpetual cycle of the seasons, between birth and death. The imposing panorama of the Alpine scenery gives rise to a pantheistic vision of extraordinary figurative impact and profoundly symbolic intrinsic value.