This work entered the Collection together with Morning on the Tiber and The Capitol with the acquisition of the Istituto Bancario Italiano (IBI) Collection in 1991.

As a result of the major urban renewal projects launched in Milan in the wake of Italian Unification Piazza Cordusio (formerly Piazza Ellitica), located on the main thoroughfare linking Piazza del Duomo to Castello Sforzesco, became the city’s financial hub. During the fourth and fifth decade of the 20th century Mantovani treated this subject repeatedly, using diverse formats and supports, and producing many variants on the same view of the wide square bordered by the monumental head offices of leading banks. With a few rapid touches of colour – ochre, yellows and reds – the artist conveys the liveliness of the milling crowd in the square, engaged in various activities outside the Assicurazioni Generali headquarters, designed by the architect Luca Beltrami in 1901. The imposing mass of the building dominates the view, allowing us only a glimpse of the sketchily rendered Cathedral.

Datable to the second half of the 1940s, the work was executed with a fluid technique arrived at through the intense and consistent pictorial research undertaken by the artist since his debut, but which seemed outmoded in this period. The ever-more rapid and chaotic brushstrokes cause the forms and the background to merge in an evanescent, hazy image. The artist’s intense activity as a watercolourist – documented by his participation in the exhibitions organised by the Associazione degli Acquarellisti Lombardi, headed by his friend Paolo Sala – had helped him to perfect the swift, light touch of his maturity. In the last decade of his career, which ended with his death in 1957, Mantovani treated the same subjects continually. These were mainly well-known, stereotyped views of Milan and Venice, including Ripa Ticinese in the Collection.