In Monza, the 20th century was opened by the royal assassination of Umberto I, which put an end to an era and for some time seemed to paralyse the city’s social and cultural life. In those same years, the city experienced a strong contrast between the ongoing transformation of production in an industrial sense and a still very strong rural reality that found its social meeting place and the exchange of agricultural products in the San Giovanni market.
The large square in the centre of the city, the ancient Pratum magnum, was an evocative setting that did not escape the notice of three artists sensitive to reality – Eugenio Baioni, Anselmo Bucci and Guido Caprotti – who, at the beginning of the second decade of the century, perhaps presaging its loss, immortalised the scene of the fair in a ‘triptych’ of great narrative freshness.
In the same years, these three artists, flanked by other young people, created the Coenobium, a non-formalised association that aimed to modernise the city’s art, which they still saw as a 19th-century heritage.
Piazza del Mercato, renamed Trento e Trieste after the victorious outcome of the Great War, then became the scene of new artistic disputes: the construction of the imposing War Memorial, which was awarded by competition to the sculptor Enrico Pancera from Caravaggio, who prevailed over Baioni from Monza, left many controversial trails and gave a new visual identity to the square, which was finally put on paper in 1951 by Bucci.
01: Eugenio Baioni, Sketch: the market. Oil on canvas, 1910
02: Anselmo Bucci, Monza, summer market. Oil on canvas, 1911
03: Guido Caprotti,The San Giovanni market in Monza. Oil on canvas, 1910
04: Anselmo Bucci, Pont Saint Michel. Oil on canvas, 1914
05: Eugenio Baioni, The Sacrifice (sketch for the Monument of War Dead). Bronze and marble, 1926