“Farmers in the Fields” by Lorenzo Viani Oil on canvas painting from 1936, signed L. Viani on the bottom right. Dimensions: cm h 49 x 40 with frame cm h 64 x 55 Viani Lorenzo (Viareggio, November 1, 1882 – Lido di Ostia, November 2, 1936) Lorenzo Viani always felt attracted to the poorest and most destitute, both in his childhood and in his maturity. Viani transfers the life and human story of the weakest onto the canvas, with strong chromatic impressions and with a decisive and quick brushstroke, an intense, expressive and at times extremely melancholy painting. What makes Viani a great master, too often forgotten, is his mastery in making drama, lyricism and poetic grace coexist in his works, in feeling the humble emotion in the face of the disinherited. The poverty of artistic means is a choice; the rough painting becomes essentiality; sobriety an animalistic instinct in grasping the forms of the life of the humble, of hunger, of prison, of illness, of solitude, of the struggle with the countryside or with the sea, of war, of madness and of pain. Viani's narrative work constitutes a typical example of dialectal expressionism. Its origins lie in a disturbed vision of things, disturbed from the depths, which translates into an exasperated deformation of landscapes as well as human faces. The writer uses an extraordinary verbal richness, drawn from the Viareggio dialectal background, from the maritime or military or cunning jargon, where it is most possible for him to derive expressionistic exasperations. The dialect of Versilia and Lucca, so lively in the language of Enrico Pea, becomes lyrical fervor in Lorenzo Viani, an expressionist painter who began to become famous in the early 1930s.