Daniele Ranzoni

Daniele Ranzoni was born to a working-class family (his father was a cobbler), in Intra, a town today incorporated into the municipality of Verbania-Pallanza on the Piedmont side of Lake Maggiore.

A precocious artist, he started his academic training at age thirteen at the Brera Academy in Milan, a city at the time still under the Austrian rule.

At the insistence of his rich patrons from Intra, he continued his studies at the Albertina Academy in Turin – a logical choice for somebody born in Piedmont- But owing to a prestigious scholarship from the Collegio Caccia in Novara he was granted the right to resume his studies at Brera in Milan, where he trained under Giuseppe Bertini a remarkable teacher who encouraged his pupils to sketch from nature and experiment with primary colors.

Vibrant splashes of color are applied directly on the canvas, without preliminary drawing, in a cursory brushwork that emphasizes tonal nuances, and suggests volumes and contrasts of light.

Two of these pupils became artists, Paul Troubetzkoy, the internationally renowned Belle Époque sculptor and Pierre, the society painter.

As if mental illness had intensified the acuteness of his vision, this tormented period (just before and immediately after the hospitalization) corresponds to the acme in Ranzoni’s evolution.

The municipal “Galleria d’Arte Moderna Paolo e Adele Giannoni” in Novara, holds in permanent loans the two paintings of the Collegio Caccia, Ritratto di Giovane Donna and Fratello e sorella.