The Fourth Estate (painting)
The Fourth Estate () is an oil painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, originally titled The Path of Workers and made between 1898 and 1901. It depicts a moment during a labor strike when workers' representatives calmly and confidently stride out of a crowd to negotiate for the workers' rights. Its name refers to the working class as standing alongside the three traditional estates that divided power between the nobility, clergy, and commoners. Pellizza made three separate large-scale preliminary versions of the work to experiment with his divisionist representations of color. After his death, The Fourth Estate became a popular Italian socialist image and was reproduced extensively despite its initial shunning by formal art circles. Over time, its acclaim grew until it became recognized as one of the most important Italian paintings of the turn of the 20th century. The painting is now at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. History 1891–1895: Ambasciatori della Fame Following the Italian Risorgimento, the peasant and bourgeois classes of the new country had an uncertain relationship. Some bourgeois intellectuals bemoaned the lowering of Italian culture, while artists—particularly the divisionists—brought social themes into their artwork. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo tried to unite the techniques of divisionism with the influence of the farmers' mutual aid society he had joined in his hometown of Volpedo and the socialist writings of the Second International. Pellizza began to work on a study for Ambasciatori della Fame (Ambassadors of Hunger) in 1891, after participating in a workers' protest in Turin. The scene made such an impression on him that he noted it in his diary: The first sketch was completed in April 1891. The subject was a workers' revolt in Piazza Malaspina in Volpedo, with three subjects placed at the front of the protest. The scene is viewed from above, and the figures are distributed on orthogonal lines. This core composition remained in successive versions of the work, each of which presents the three figures in front of a mass of people in the background and a dark backdrop. The shadow stretching out to the ambassador's feet is likely the palazzo on Piazza Malaspina, where the workers are going to make their demands. Pellizza made numerous other intermediary works between the first drawing of Ambasciatori della Fame and Fiumana. He also made Piazza Malaspina a Volpedo in 1891, which represents the topography of Volpedo as a preparatory background for the subsequent versions. He made two other versions of Ambasciatori della Fame, one dated 1892 and the other 1895. The 1892 sketch is similar to the first. However, Pellizza added a group of women to the 1892 drawing, who are juxtaposed with the male workers. The last draft before La Fiumana is the 1895 version of Ambasciatori, created after three quiet years on brown paper as a charcoal and gesso drawing. Pelliza wrote of it: In the passage above, the artist underlined his wish to follow a general theory: not only to represent the citizens of Volpedo, but also an entire