To compare Grandi’s works realized prior to Cremona’s death to the painter’s canvases, allows one to realize how much of a revolution based on a painterly approach to sculpture the former was bringing forth.
The type of research he departed from ,of which one can find a foresight in the writings of Rovani, was barely began by Vicenza Vela , and carried on in some ways by Edoardo Tabacchi , his teacher born like him at Ganna (Varese).
Grandi going beyond their example, succeeded in articulating a concept of plasticity that is antithetical to what was traditionally understood as “sculpture “.
By so doing he opened the road to Medardo Rosso, who even though he was not always fair in recognizing his debt toward the Scapigliatura movement, characterized him as « a sculptor to venerate». In the bronze L’Edera [ The Ivy] of 1878 , Grandi borrowed Cremona’s symbolical title for the painting of the same year to which this small sculpture is indebted in more than one way. This bronze and others, such as The Marechal Ney or The Mourner , all casted after 1874, demonstrate that Grandi had assimilated the Scapigliati pictorial principle by which a form on canvas is not a drawing filled with color but, on the contrary, a process of modeling through brushstrokes which abolish the volumes.
Grandi is the first to have attempted to find a sculptural transposition of this revolutionary principle.
Such an endeavor obliged him to modify the transcription of space :non longer desirous to model a sculpture as if it were a tridimensional object independent from circumambient factors, Grandi had to break the external surfaces to open them to light and therefore built from negative spaces, no longer solely from positive ones.
For that reason, the term «painterly sculptures» generally used to define such phenomenon, might be insufficient to evoke the complexity of it: it gives an idea of the treatment of the surfaces but does not convey the necessary rethinking of forms behind it.

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