Appunti per una resistenza culturale 16: "Il Bacio" di Francesco Hayez

The painting, which was exhibited in Breslau in 1859, entitled The Kiss, an episode of youth, costumes of the 14th century, immediately became extremely popular. For two reasons. On the one hand, for the audacity, the sensuality, the extreme naturalness with which it represents the kiss between two young people. And on the other hand, because it is immediately a political painting, a painting that tells us about Hayez's adhesion to the ideal of the Renaissance. Because the embrace is also the embrace, the alliance between France and Italy for the wars of independence. So it is this intersection of the two tricolors. In the subsequent versions that Hayez will compose, these two tricolors are explained with the addition of the panels on the stairs. It is a costume painting, therefore a painting within a tradition of romantic painting, a history painting. And it is also a theater painting, a painting that knows about theater. A painting in which everything is theater, the light has that character, this shadow carried up the stairs, how it enters the wall, almost from the fifth scene, with this opening in the dark, with that figure that moves away. The shadow that in this episode of youth, in the fullness of a nascent nation, still casts a shadow of anxiety. On the plane of the shapes, it unites an extremely thin, closed linear tension, which also tells us about Hayez's neoclassical formation towards Canova. And on the other hand, this wise colorism in the tactile, illuministic and coloristic rendering of the razor, in which Hayez thinks of Tiziano, thinks of Savoldo.