28 Facts About Giovanni Segantini

Giovanni Segantini was an Italian painter known for his large pastoral landscapes of the Alps.

Giovanni Segantini was one of the most famous artists in Europe in the late 19th century, and his paintings were collected by major museums.

Giovanni Segantini was active in Switzerland during the last period of his life.

Giovanni Segantini later changed his family name by adding an "n" after the "a".

Giovanni Segantini was the second child of Agostino Segatini and Margarita De Girardi.

Except for a six-month period in 1864 when Agostino returned to Trentino, Giovanni Segantini spent his early years with his mother, who experienced severe depression due to the death of Lodovico.

Giovanni Segantini's father left Giovanni under the care of Irene, his second child from a previous marriage, and again traveled in search of work.

Giovanni Segantini died a year later without returning home and leaving his family nothing.

Giovanni Segantini was forced to spend most of her time working menial jobs while leaving Giovanni to maintain on his own.

At age seven, Giovanni Segantini ran away and was later found living on the streets of Milan.

Napoleon ran a photography studio, and Giovanni Segantini learned the basics of this relatively new art form while working there with his half-brother.

In spite of these difficulties, Giovanni Segantini was thoroughly devoted to Bice throughout his life.

Giovanni Segantini wrote many love letters when he was away from her, sometimes including wild flowers that he had picked.

In 1886, Giovanni Segantini sought a less expensive place to live and, attracted by the beautiful mountain scenery, he moved his family to Savognin, Graubunden.

At the 1890 Salon des XX in Brussels, Giovanni Segantini was given an entire exhibition room, an honor awarded such greats as Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Frustrated that the government would not grant him citizenship papers in spite of his fame, Giovanni Segantini refused to pay cantonal taxes in Savognin.

Giovanni Segantini studied Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio and Goethe and especially Nietzsche, becoming so fascinated with the latter that he drew an illustration for the first Italian translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Giovanni Segantini met and corresponded at length with Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, an Italian Neo-Impressionist whose color techniques he admired.

Giovanni Segantini continued to gain recognition in Italy, and in 1894 the Castello Sforzesco in Milan put on a retrospective of ninety of his works.

At the first Venice Biennale in 1895, Giovanni Segantini was awarded the Prize of the Italian State for his painting Return to the Homeland.

Giovanni Segantini continued to gain fame when a whole room was devoted to his work in the Munich Secession in 1896.

In 1897, Giovanni Segantini was commissioned by a group of local hotels to build a huge panorama of the Engadin valley to be shown in a specially built round hall at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Giovanni Segantini redesigned the concept into a large triptych known as Life, Nature and Death, which is his most famous work.

Giovanni Segantini continued to work on it until his death.

Eager to finish the third part of his large triptych, Nature Giovanni Segantini returned to the high altitude of the mountains near Schafberg.

In 1908, the Giovanni Segantini Museum was established in St Moritz, its design inspired by one of the sketches for the pavilions for the Engadine Panorama.

Giovanni Segantini's 1896 painting Love at the Fountain of Life reflects Segantini's philosophical approach to his art.

Art historian Robert Rosenblum described Giovanni Segantini as transforming "the earthbound into the spiritual", and the artist himself referred to his work as "naturalist Symbolism".