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This lively scene’s hustle and bustle is bursting with countless stories of market life around the Madonna fountain on the Piazza d’Erbe in Verona. Where should we start? With the workers laying cobbles in the foreground? Or the boys scuffling directly to the left: They are asking the well-dressed tourist couple behind them for a few coins. It’s no distance, in turn, from this couple to the bird sellers struggling to control their fluttering creatures tied to long poles – and so the action continues in the same vein. As curator Heike Biedermann explains:

“This painting does not open the viewer so quickly or easily. You need to take a stroll, as it were, through the picture, discovering all these very diverse episodes.”

On such a walk through the teeming crowd in the interplay of light and shade, your eyes first find a more peaceful spot in front of the house façades around the street leading into the background. With the bright, narrow strips of sky above the Via Palliciana, Adolph Menzel sets a striking accent in the work.

In 1884, Menzel finished this composition in his Berlin studio. But he had started work on it long before. On his visit to Verona, he made countless sketches from life of the packed crowds on the square. Piazza d’Erbe was the last large-format oil painting by Adolf Menzel, a leading Prussian artist renowned across Germany not least for his historical recreations of episodes from the life of Frederick the Great.

Driven by his need to capture what he saw in images, Menzel was constantly sketching and drawing – the basis of his highly productive and diverse oeuvre as a painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Much admired even during his lifetime, he is regarded today as the outstanding realist artist in nineteenth century Germany. In his Piazza d’Erbe painting, Adolph Menzel also analysed his own era, as curator Heike Biedermann tells us:

“Of course, this is also a mirror, as it were, of the industrial age, with its vibrant urban life and fast pace. In this respect, the hubbub, turmoil and pace at such an Italian market also reflects the intensity and speed of the years as the late nineteenth century drew to a close.”