In the spring of 1906 Giulio Aristide Sartorio - then at the height of his artistic fame as the protagonist of Italian Symbolist painting - accepted to create a series of monumental paintings on canvas for the more than 200 square meter wall surfaces of the Central Hall of the Venice Biennale of 1907: “The Poem of Human Life”.

The artist proposed a highly dramatic view of human existence divided into four main scenes called Light (La Luce), Darkness (Le Tenebre), Love (L´Armore), and Death (La Morte) – combined with ten vertical panels, the Caryatids.

Each of the four horizontal main paintings consists of two frieze bands separated by a writing cartouche. The writing and a painted wide frame, as well as the painting in monochrome reinforce the impression of a stone relief. This is due to the artist´s desire to recall the marble reliefs of the classical antiquity, in particular those of the Augustan Ara Pacis excavated since 1903.

The present oil on canvas study of considerable size is Sartorio´s bozzetto for a part of the upper frieze of the painting Light (503 x 646 cm), finished on the 20th of October 1906. The exhibition catalogue of the Biennale 1907 explained the complex iconography:

„la nascita di un essere e il ciclo delle ore. Nella zona superiore del dipinto le Parche recano il neonato, mentre le Erinni vanno sollevando le serpi, immagini del Male, che i Dioscuri, divinità propizie, s’apprestano a trafiggere...“[ ]

The birth of a new life presented by the fates, and the dioskuri riding up from the right. The epigram in the writing cartouche „Ti attendon l’ore luminose e fosche“ announces no less dramatically a changing destiny with light and shadow.

In its extemporaneous and at the same time precise rendering the study even surpasses the executed painting. The expressive power and creative inspiration, as well as the masterful handling of the monumental format are impressive. Free of architectural elements, and painted nearly monochrome in greyish-green and stone-white, the attention and interest are focused on the exceptional arrangement of the figures in movement.

Giulio Aristide Satorio was one of the most important painters in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his monumental bozzetto La Luce symbolizes not only the beginning of human life but also of the Nascità della Modernità in Italy.