Dipinto a olio su cartoncino (altrimenti detto “Tavoletta”) “Paesaggi lacustri”

The painting is oil on cardboard (also called "tablet") representing a lake landscape with mountains, vegetation and boat figures. It offers a fascinating glimpse of the lake with an emotional charge of the landscape, as described in certain passages of Alessandro Manzoni in the novel "The Betrothed." The lake subject is explored in this painting and rendered in all its environmental scenic value, in the life that will lead, in the manifestation of the atmospheric and seasonal situation, with typical brightness and colors of Romanticism, according to the feeling and character of painter. The painter is Achille Befani (Naples 15/09/1832 - 28/10/1906 Milano), this is his name, was an opera singer in his youth, before devoting himself to painting under the pseudonym Formis. It learnt at the Neapolitan Institute of Fine Arts. Even before the Thirty Years he moved to Milan, at that time the capital of the Italian melodrama. He painted with E. Gignous, Giuseppe Bertini, Eleuterio Pagliano. He was also a painter of the figure, but is essentially a landscape painter. He travelled in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, in particular in Turkey. He participated in the annual events in Brera, in 1887 at the Exhibition in Venice Art International, where he returned in 1899 with a view of the Mantova countryside. Then he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1880, in Berlin in 1896 and in Monaco of Bavaria in 1901 and 1906, the year of his death. Formis opens in recent years symbolist ideas (Harmonies montanine, presented in Milan in 1900). Careless and alien to contemporary Italian experience of Pointillism and to the developments of European painting, Formis in all his production is always faithful kept the stylistic dictates of Lombard naturalism, interpreted with a finely shadowy and melancholy, thick deemed too easy and academic. Bibliography F. Filippi, Le Belle Arti a Torino. Lettere sulla IV Esposizione Nazionale, Milano, 1880 F. Fontana, Scalpelli e pennelli, Torino, 1880; Achille Formis, in “Emporium”, dicembre 1906 E. Somaré, Storia dei pittori italiani dell’800, Milano, 1928 G. Nicodemi, M. Bezzola, La Galleria d’arte moderna di Milano - I dipinti, Milano, 1935; U. Galletti, E. Camesasca, Enciclopedia della pittura italiana, Milano, 1950 L. Mallé, I dipinti della Galleria d’Arte moderna, Torino, 1968 E. Piceni, M. Monteverdi, Pittura Lombarda dell’800, Milano, Cariplo, 1969 G. L. Marini, Formis Befani Achille, in Dizionario Bolaffi dei pittori, Milano, 1970 Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, Leipzig, 1992 AA.VV., La Pittura in Italia - L'ottocento - Electa, Milano, 1991 Dizionario Enciclopedico Bolaffi dei pittori e degli incisori italiani dall'XI al XX secolo, Torino, 1972 A. M. Comanducci, Dizionario illustrato dei pittori e incisori italiani moderni, Milano, 1962