The depiction of Autumn is, indeed, conceived by Berthon as an allegory of life and of its sentimental declinations in a season particularly dear to the aestheticists of the end of the century, starting from Gabriele d’Annunzio: here appear, indeed, maternal tenderness personified, in close up, by a curvy woman receiving a seasonal fruit from her son; the solace of music is entrusted to two young people captured by the sound of the flute; the gift of passion is enclosed in the embrace of lovers moving away on the horizon of the woods. The painting, in its monumental size, corresponds on the other hand to the aesthetic concepts intended to contrast the clamour of the “industrial Circe”, ready to dominate with the arrival of the avant-guards, adhering to a syncretism in the arts that funnelled literary themes, musical suggestions, and mystical and philosophical musings into paintings able to demonstrate the complexity of the human experience in respect to the materialism of a progress believed to be the enemy of spiritual resources.

Excerpt  of the expertise by prof. Carlo Sisi