File:Artgate Fondazione Cariplo - Bazzaro Leonardo, Scena alpestre o Il Mottarone.jpg

Although this large canvas entered the Istituto Bancario Italiano (IBI) Collection from a private collection under the title The Mottarone, the subject is more likely a pasture in the Val di Cogne.

The erroneous identification can be attributed to the alpine view’s having been associated with the extensive series of landscapes, which includes Herdsmen’s Huts at Macugnaga, executed by the artist during his visits to the environs of Gignese, on Lake Maggiore, from the last decade of the 19th century on. These places and the highest peaks of the Lombardy and Valle d’Aosta alps are recurrent in Bazzaro’s landscape painting. The Gran Paradiso and Val di Cogne provided the inspiration for many of his canvases, including Cogne Landscape in the Banca Intesa Sanpaolo Collection [1], which depicts the same view of the glaciers as the work held by Cariplo. A similar subject is represented in the painting The Matterhorn, in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Paolo e Adele Giannoni, Novara, where the figure of the young shepherdess is placed in the centre of a valley flanked scenographically by snow-capped peaks. It is also possible that the same composition was used for Return from Gran Paradiso, the canvas displayed at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1912 [2].

With respect to the aforementioned works, datable to the mid-1910s, here the pictorial handling is less spare: the skilful juxtaposition of greens and yellows in the rendering of the meadows alludes to the thaw and to fresh new pastures, while the bright blue of the sky is reflected in the sweep of the glacier whose dazzling whiteness is slightly muted by the grey of the rocks. Light and colour effects are rendered equally painstakingly in another alpine subject in the Collection, In Midwinter by Filippo Carcano, an artist who, along with Bazzaro, was one of the protagonists of Lombard Naturalism.