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There is something in the air when centuries expire inducing artists to wonder themselves, to bring them froward again, to attempt new ways. 
This way Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio at the end of the Cinquecento get ready the classicism and naturalism revolution. The same way the baroque, at the end of the Seicento, fades away into the rococo intimism, while the neo-classicism of David, among the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, goes together first with the great purifying flare-up of the revolution and then with the napoleon adventure. Postimpressionism, symbolism, pointillisme at the end of the last century, have been the incunabula of the modern and have broken up forever. So it is well timed, since getting closer the end of the millennium, discovering again an Italian artist who lived and interpreted mindfully this urge, this need for pondered and deep answers, transmitted throughout works and thought.
Born at Ferrara in 1852, Previati made his debut in a very personal way on the set of the late Romanticism but soon, transferred to Milan, he asserted himself as one of the protagonists of the European symbolism. Both in the religious themes paintings, basic within his production, and in the merely fantastic and oneiric subjects, the artist manifests the will to enter, by the means of his own work, in the mystery of life, investigating its roots with an attitude of intensive and suffering mysticism. 
Even the technique complies with the immaterial drives of his inspiration introducing him in the rising trend of the Italian pointillism, of which Previati, along with Morbelli and Segantini, becomes one of the main supporters. 
Emulator of the pointillisme of Seurat and Signac, the artist, as he states, aims to reproduce “the sum of light throughout the separation, methodically minute, of the complementary dyes “, producing his visuals effect not anymore by the scientific matching of points of colours, as in the well-known foregoing French, but with long and stringy brushwork, vaguely related to the soft and sinuous course of the Art Nouveau line. 
Results were European level and the exhibition at Milan, by illustrating the whole creative path of Previati, places worthy the figure beside the great protagonists of the modern art between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

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