1912 was a particularly important year for the Roman historical-artistic panorama: the disagreements that had arisen towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century with the Society of Amateurs and Cultivators of Fine Arts, which had organised an annual exhibition in the capital since 1829, had led a group of artists united by a strongly foreign-oriented vision of art to want to join together to exhibit independently in large international exhibitions. Thus, in January 1912, the Roman “Secession” was born, in whose first exhibition Battaglia participated with a portrait (Lisetta) and a landscape (Fienile di Poggetello). Scrolling through the long list of names of painters, sculptors and engravers called to participate in the exhibitions of the Secession, on the one hand the desire to maintain a strong link with the nineteenth-century tradition emerges, on the other the propensity for a measured modernity, expressed mostly in the adoption of divisionism. The creation of Terra feconda is linked to this very cultural climate, in which the artist hints at the divisionist technique and uses a scansion of the image (and a frame) in line with the international secessionist taste, even in the representation of a scene with a nineteenth-century flavour: a large group of Roman artists of Battaglia's generation adhered to these tendencies, among whom we should particularly remember, for stylistic and iconographic affinity, the painter Umberto Coromaldi in paintings such as Verso il paese (Towards the Country) (1911, Rome, Galleria d'Arte Moderna).

Terra feconda was presented at the tenth Venice Biennale (1912), as attested by the labels still visible on the back of the canvas, where there is also a curious note in which the artist, in addition to providing useful information for assembling the panels, recommends "taking maximum care when assembling the triptych". Another inscription, placed on the frame of the left panel, indicates the location to which the depicted views refer: "Anticoli Corrado (province of Rome)". When in the early nineteenth century intellectuals from all over Europe, during the Grand Tour, began to explore the surroundings of Rome in search of picturesque views and new sources of inspiration, the village of Anticoli Corrado was one of the most interesting discoveries, especially for painters. In addition to the landscape and the characteristic architecture, they were fascinated by the inhabitants, both for their beauty and ease in posing, and for their proverbial hospitality. Thus, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, an ever-increasing number of artists stayed there, renting studios for more or less long periods in which they could work far from the chaos of the city. The fame of the village, whose models posed for some of the most important monuments of the Capital in the early twentieth century, intrigued many artists of great caliber, including, to name but a few, Arturo Martini (resident in Anticoli Corrado from 1924 to 1927), Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, who went there for the first time in 1925, and then returned accompanied by Gianfranco Barruchello in 1965. The relationship of many of these personalities with Anticoli Corrado is today documented in the collections of the Civic Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, established in 1935.

Alessandro Battaglia was one of the most assiduous visitors to the village, also due to family ties: his uncle, the painter Augusto Bompiani (who had introduced him to painting together with his mother Clelia Bompiani Battaglia, also a painter), had in fact married Anna Piacentini from Anticoli. Therefore, glimpses of Anticoli Corrado are frequent in Battaglia's paintings: those of the side panels of Terra feconda, in particular, represent the so-called "plain of the hills", cultivated with wheat and olives but also a grazing area, from which characteristic rock formations rise, immortalised in numerous paintings by artists active between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The majestic figure in the center, for which the Anticolana model Camilla Curti posed, stands as a personification of fertility, in open dialogue with the landscape teeming with life on the side panels. The child in his left arm wears a coral necklace around his neck, according to an iconography dear to the Renaissance tradition in the representation of the Virgin with Child: it is a symbol linked to the protective value of the necklace which, according to ancient beliefs, would ward off illnesses and dangers from pregnancy, extending its power to the newborn.

The woman wears the traditional dress and carries on her head the so-called “cinciarella”: it is a rolled-up dishcloth with the function of cushioning the weight of the basins full of water, the so-called “scife” (wooden trays used to transport bread), the baskets full of country products or lunch – traditionally composed of “cazzaregli”, the local pasta, a piece of cheese and a flask of wine – for the men who worked in the plain of the hills.

Starting from a scene of everyday life, the artist, particularly inspired and with great lyrical inspiration, creates a work of strong symbolic value, in which fertility is associated with the proud and monumental figure of a country mother captured in a moment of intimate tenderness. Battaglia had already addressed this theme, among other things by having the same Anticolana model pose, in the painting Le Sorgenti presented at the great International Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome in 1911 (Fig. 1), in which the woman, once again, becomes the symbol of a source of life that is renewed from mother to child.

Manuel Carrera, April 2016