Made between 1907 and 1908 and presented at the Brera Biennale in 1910, Rapina is one of the first autonomous works by Angelo Barabino in which a plastic way is manifested, in shaping the forms, for shaved planes of light, synthetic and essential, which will be typical of Barabino's language throughout his career ”. The painting re-proposes a dazzling, grandiose and cruel dawn, capable of engulfing in the flickering of lights and colors the existential drama of a violated woman, abandoned in the countryside, and of her attacker, who runs away from a coward. A difficult subject that remains unique even in the production of Barabino himself, who has always been sensitive to humanitarian issues and the fate of the poor and oppressed. In Rapina, the folded silhouettes of the woman in the foreground and the man from behind, almost flattened along the edges of the support to establish an unprecedented comparison with the background, are an inseparable part of the landscape from which they fully absorb the moods, pierced by a sun that it is both salvation and condemnation.