The small canvas portrays an interior of a bedroom with a wooden floor and bare walls, which it enters, becoming the protagonist of a ray of sunshine that illuminates and emphasizes the whiteness of the sheet. "Raggio di sole", dates back to the years in which Pellizza, even if due to age limits he could no longer be regularly enrolled in academic courses, attended the Carrara Academy in Bergamo and was admitted as a "special student of prof. Heel "(Scotti, 1986, 10). Shortly thereafter, after a stay in Paris on the occasion of the Universal Exposition, he will feel the need to study and work from life, paying particular attention to the effects of light and getting closer and closer to the Divisionist research that he would later share, in the years to come. , with friends Plinio Nomellini and Angelo Morbelli. The entry of the work into the collections of the Civic Museum took place in 1952, on the occasion of the post-war rearrangement of the exhibition rooms.

The Biellese Territory Museum preserves about fifteen works by Lorenzo Delleani, coming from different private collections and which well exemplify the way of working and the favorite subjects, the pastures, the cows, the traditional procession of Fontaneimore. The two canvases depicting the Capanna Gnifetti and the Capanna Margherita, painted in 1900, differ in size: Delleani had made them in his studio, taking inspiration from two postcards of the same subject.

The work is commonly referred to as a pentyptic because the ancient frame marked the three tables in the five compartments with the Madonna enthroned with the Child in the center and Saints Bernardo d'Aosta, Giovanni Battista, Bartolomeo and Cristoforo on the sides. The original location is not clear. The work, before the last restoration to which it was subjected, was located in the presbytery of the Church of San Sebastiano and it is known that only on the occasion of the great Turin exhibition on Gothic and Renaissance in Piedmont in 1939, the three parts of which the work is composed and which at the time were in two different collections, were brought together. On that same occasion, the work was attributed to an unknown "Vercelli artist of the Spanzottian circle", returning it to the critical debate that until then had almost ignored it and that, in more recent times, has come to restore it to youthful activity by Defendente Ferrari. The collecting story of this work is undoubtedly interesting, evidence of the dangerous, but unfortunately frequent, dispersion of the ecclesiastical heritage created following the suppression of religious orders. The work was not only dismembered and sold but also heavily remodeled in the two side panels, as evidenced by some period photographs, which show extensive repainting in correspondence with the originally unpainted spaces on which the ancient carpentry rested.

The work exhibited here takes us back to Leonardo's masterpiece known as the Virgin of the Rocks. Attributed to Bernardino de Conti, court painter in the service of the French government established in Milan since 1499, the painting is the oldest known copy of the second version of Leonardo's masterpiece preserved in the National Gallery in London, created for the Church of San Francesco Grande. in Milan. A document drawn up in 1508 is known which testifies that in that year a copy was made by Ambrogio de Predis under the direct supervision of Leonardo; it is therefore very likely that the copy of Biella, conforming to the original in size and detail, was also made on the same occasion. The commissioner of the work was the illustrious Sebastiano Ferrero from Biella, at that time general of the ducal finances of Milan on behalf of the French government, after years of service at the Savoy court, as councilor of state and general treasurer. The panel, although not knowing its ancient location, remained for a long time in the sacristy of the Church of San Sebastiano and arrived in the Museum at the beginning of the 2000s, after careful restoration. Recently, thanks to the temporary deposit wanted by the La Marmora family, the work has been reunited with the two side panels that originally decorated it, depicting Sebastiano Ferrero and his sons.

"From 1926 onwards my usual summer home is Forte dei Marmi, where I found the magic of a landscape that suited my intimate feeling", wrote Carlo Carrà in 1940, when Versilia was still an inexhaustible source of subjects for him: simplicity of the architecture of the piers, mountains, huts, poles that he had begun to immortalize in Liguria in the 1920s, with Il pino sul mare, are characteristics that return, immersed in silent nature, even in this Marina that Bruno Blotto Baldo wanted donate to the Civic Museum of Biella in 1952, on the occasion of the reopening of the Museum. It is a view of Cinquale, a recurring subject in Carrà's mature production, played here on several floors, with the coast in the foreground, the sea animated by a sailboat and the distant promontory that closes the inlet. The sea was a theme - as his son Massimo had the opportunity to declare - "that really fascinated my father for almost half a century, so much so that it became perhaps his most effective tool to fully express his idea of a painting capable of creating in exclusively pictorial terms the complex relationship between the artist and reality, mirroring the relationship between man and his world ". And here, the extreme simplification of the form and the very meditated essentiality of the composition - a legacy of the puristic acquisitions of the years of "Plastic Values" - return to accentuate that muted tonalism of the greens, blues and grays, which contrast with the red of the roof. of the shed to which, the apparently casual cut of the image, gives the role of decentralized chromatic fulcrum. The work, signed and dated, dates back to 1940, the year in which it was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, as evidenced by the exhibition catalog and the label affixed to the back, which bears the words "XXII International Biennial Art Exhibition. Venice 1940 ". La Marina, published in the general catalog of Carrà's pictorial work (1967), was mistakenly included among the works of 1941. Although in the absence of certain documentation, it is assumed that it may have been purchased by Blotto Baldo not long after the Venetian exhibition of which he was a frequent visitor.

The space in which the great figure of the drummer is placed has abandoned any logic of structuring and proportionality. The dimensional relationships of characters, animals and architectures as well as the chromatic layers of intense tones mainly blue, red and yellow contribute to the creation of a lively and visionary representation in which once again the figure of a musician, positioned between heaven and earth, triumphs over everything. The iconographies of the peasant women, of the houses with wooden roofs, of the donkeys and of the cows, alluding to life in the artist's native town, inhabit a kaleidoscopic vision impregnated by the now remote memories of childhood, but always and in any case well alive in the heart and in the eyes of the artist and that indeed, in the distance from his homeland, they recall and exalt each other. The work was dated to the years following 1948 when Chagall returned to France from the United States, where he had been forced to emigrate, and it is precisely in these years that numerous guaches works characterized by a dense and compact chromatic material date back. In the 1940s, during his stay in America, the painter matured a strong and impulsive use of color together with a metaphorical and mythicizing reworking of some personal iconographic themes, all elements present in the painting from the Lucci collection. A production whose results are in full contradiction with the sweet and pastoral lyricism of the previous period.

The canvas exhibited here is one of the first works in which the famous Belgian artist interprets surrealist poetics with a personal language, addressing the theme of sleep. L’épreuve du sommeil, or The trial of sleep, is the title chosen for this work, dated between the end of 1926 and the beginning of the following year. The head of a woman lying with the nape facing the viewer is framed from a very close observation point, which excludes the rest of the body and the furnishings of the room from the field of representation, except for a white cloth. It is on this element that the critics have focused, attributing different meanings to it, linking it to biographical events - such as the traumatic memory of the suicide of the mother, drowned in a canal and fished out with her face covered by her clothes - or interpreting it as a quote from a 'work by Man Ray of 1920, consisting of a sewing machine packed in a blanket that hid its shape, thus underlining Magritte's desire to update himself on the novelties proposed by the Parisian surrealists. Will that also emerges in the detail of the female hair made with a comb technique, already proposed by Max Ernst in some of his works. Magritte wrote in his own hand with a brush on the back of the canvas, as was his custom, the title of the work, which was exhibited in Brussels in 1927 at the artist's first solo exhibition.

A short text in dialogue in which the evident differences in class between the cold boy and the couple sitting in the heat of a room intent on having a hearty meal were underlined, accompanied - in the newspaper "Lotta di classe" of May 1st 1894 - the reproduction of the painting by Emilio Longoni. On the same day the painting was exhibited to the public, in the spaces of the Castello Sforzesco, for the second edition of the Brera Triennale. The provocative combination of text and image immediately caused the reaction of the censors who ordered the seizure of the newspaper and police checks also against Emilio Longoni and made this painting one of the most discussed and cited works by critics of the entire production. of the artist. The Reflections of a Hungry Mark the highest point of social commitment in the painting of Emilio Longoni, who between 1887 and 1897 elaborated and developed his own iconography of the exploitation, misery and struggle of the Milanese subordinate classes. The work turns out to be an important affirmation of the expressive possibilities of the pointillist technique. In fact, if the iconographic combination of characters belonging to different social classes was a widespread typology in genre painting, the technical means used by the artist to represent it was instead unprecedented. The painting, which entered the Museum's collections in 1952 thanks to the donation of Bruno Blotto Baldo, then mayor of Biella, enjoyed great critical success, often cited in studies on divisionism and social art, has been exhibited and continues to be required for important international exhibitions.

Encouraged to devote himself to painting by Lorenzo Delleani, after having studied at the Accademia Albertina, Giuseppe Bozzalla - grandson of Quintino Sella - continued to attend his first teacher, proudly declaring himself his "favorite and most affectionate pupil", however he soon departed from him. for subjects treated and for the technique used: the snowy landscapes, almost completely absent in the painting of the Aniana, invade that of Bozzalla who prefers a technique made of small strokes of the palette knife to the energetic brushstroke of the master. If in Delleani it was light and color that triumphed, Bozzalla's works seem to be played on never violent shades and tones of color, almost evoking melancholy and nostalgic feelings. Among colors and vapors, a work of great commitment, in terms of size and pictorial conception, it was presented in Turin at the 1904 Exposition of the Promoter and had the honor of being reproduced in the Catalog: curiously in the photograph we note that the worker placed at the extreme right is represented with bare head, differently from the final version. After the exhibition, the canvas was purchased by Vittorio Emanuele III and transferred to Rome, at the Quirinale, where it remained until the institutional referendum of 1946. From that moment on traces are lost until the Biella anthology of 1960, where the work was exhibited as the property of Rodolfo Caraccio, a wealthy wool industrialist. With a testamentary disposition, Caraccio donated it in 1972, together with another work by Bozzalla - A Messa prima - to the Civic Administration of Biella who undertook to allocate it to the Civic Museum. It is in fact a realistic interpretation of the work linked to the dyeing of fabrics, a procedure that Bozzalla knew directly as the son of a textile industrialist. The scene, which takes place in a closed environment saturated with vapors, is set with an almost photographic cut and appears as the result of a rigorous research.

Judith and Holofernes, is one of the three canvases exhibited in the Museum that were originally made to be placed as a piece of furniture, or as an overdoor. They were painted by Giovanni Battista Crosato, a painter and set designer of Venetian origins, who stayed periodically from 1733 in Piedmont, at the service of the Savoy court, working on the frescoes in the hunting lodge of Stupinigi, in Villa della Regina, in the Royal Palace and , as a set designer, at the Teatro Regio. The painter deals with the theme of biblical heroines, representing the stories of Judith and Holofernes, Giale and Sisara and Samson and Delilah, female figures united by the cunning with which they save their people from the enemy threat. Known above all as a frescante, Giovanni Battista Crosato undoubtedly had a prominent place in the eighteenth-century artistic panorama, developing his own personal language, characterized by a painting with a sparkling and rapid and, at the same time, elegant brushstroke. Features that also emerge well in the three canvases of the Museum, from the Masserano collection, in which each scene is framed in architectural backgrounds and finds its focal point in the female figure, the protagonist of the biblical episode represented.

The painter Lorenzo Delleani (Pollone, 1840-Turin, 1908) is portrayed in full length and stands out against a landscape backdrop well known to the Biellese: the facade of the old Church of Oropa taken from the south side of the cloister, gives memory of the strong bond that the painter had with the Oropa Valley, immortalized thousands of times on the well-known wooden "slats". In his right hand he holds the color palette, along with the brushes and rag. The portrait made of him by Leonardo Bistolfi - commissioned by a committee that was formed in the aftermath of the painter's death, which took place in Turin, on November 13, 1908 - emanates the serenity and seriousness of an now elderly man who had shaped his own life indulging their passions and inclinations. On the ground are placed a three-legged stool, a briefcase of paints and other tools of the trade, which accompanied him wherever he went: Delleani is a painter en plein air, used to immortalizing the landscapes that struck him most, painting on wooden tablets with a pasty and expressive painting.