THE MAKING OF A MEME, 1897

How Vittorio Alinari transformed a prize-winning painting into a global icon

Vittorio Alinari (1859–1932) is celebrated as a documentary photographer, but his most famous creation is the Madonnina, “The Madonna of the Streets,” from a painting by Roberto Ferruzzi (1853–1934). Vittorio was the right man in the right place, at the right time, to transform Ferruzzi’s painting, which had won the second Venice Biennale in 1897, into an icon popular worldwide. His father and two uncles had formed Fratelli Alinari in Florence in 1854, splitting creative, technical and business responsibilities, and the firm went on to photograph and publish several genres of photographic documentation: art (paintings, sculpture, architecture), portraits and topographical views. Early product lines included albumen prints of art works in the carte de visite format (2”x 3½”), stereoscopic picture cards, and portfolios of themed prints suitable for mounting in albums.

Zoom pocket microscope is invaluable for examining printing methods.

 At 20x magnification, the three colours—blue, black and yellow—are visible, and the cross-line photogravure intaglio method, identified by the square/diamond shaped dots and raised ink. (The image here was taken with a mobile phone camera, slightly off centre to avoid undue reflection from the microscope’s illumination.)

When Vittorio Alinari took over the family business in 1892, photography was gaining artistic respectability, and the photogravure process was emerging as an important medium of art photography, favoured by Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) in the UK and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in the USA, amongst others. Vittorio bought Ferruzzi’s painting and its reproduction rights, with the intention of reproducing it—more specifically an ex novo adaptation thereof—in many media.

Postcards, c.1900. Left: monochrome photogravure. Right: 4-colour (teal, red, beige and black). © Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia

For the painting (now vanished) that won the Biennale may not have been exactly the image that would meme the world, as there exist photographs of a very similar horizontal canvas, with woman and child shown in a bright classical setting amongst trees and architectural ruins. The iconic vertical format, with plain background, corresponds closely to a preparatory sketch by Ferruzzi. This much is described by the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia.

One may assume, therefore, that it was the entrepreneurial genius of Vittorio Alinari to recognize that a little art direction was in order, relocating the Madonnina from Arcadia to ghetto, and that a photograph of the sketch, or of a finished canvas, cropped, or perhaps even of a newly commissioned copy of the original, could be the basis for various graphic processes that would make it suitable for different qualities and price points of reproduction, in monochrome, process or spot colours. Such was his success that the image assumed a life of its own, its religious sentiment stimulating all manner of unauthorized kitsch derivations, far from the exquisite quality of early 20th century photogravure reproductions.

“Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935, translated by Harry Zohn. ●