The first flooring of Scapigliatura in the visual arts and its most revolutionary moment took place in the seventies;
in facts, it can be considered concluded with the departure of Ranzoni for England in 1877 and the death of Cremona in 1878.
After less than two years of painful sacrifices and loneliness, embittered by the rejection of two of his works at the Royal Academy , Ranzoni in September 1879 returned to Milan only to discover that his world there no longer existed: Rovani, the movement guru who used to predicate the new doctrine on the tables of the osterie was dead, so was his brotherly friend Cremona, and Grandi was unavailable, completely absorbed in the epic realization of the monument to the Five Days: the boheme he had been part of was a thing of the past.
While in his earlier paintings, the outsider outlook, steaming from his humble origins, didn’t prevent him from showing an affectionate empathy with the society he portrayed , the paintings realized after the English stay, mark an irrevocable turning point in his oeuvre.
Their resolutely non finished aspect, already a characteristic feature of a few of Cremona’s late works, became a constant in his research, which patrons and critics alike refused to understand: the incompleteness of these late paintings cannot be reduced, as it has been too often done, to a consequence of his growing mental illness: on the contrary, it is a definite choice which reflects his greater involvement with the Romantic aesthetics.
Ranzoni portraits then are constructed more and more on a sculptural intent through which the figures dominate the space with a presence that has no equivalent in Cremona or any other Scapigliato.
Albeit a progressive worsening of the psychosis which diminished his productivity quantitatively, in the last tragic years of his life, Ranzoni elaborated a highly personal language to translate in a painterly way a state of mind altered by a worsening anguish : the emotional intensity of these works is in itself a foreboding of twenty century Expressionism.
He died in Intra on December 29th, 1889. His passing is like a metaphor for the end of an era.
The extreme synthesis of his late portraits finds an echo only in the work of another Scapigliato, likewise” alien “to his surroundings, Medardo Rosso.

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