File:Hail Mary - II (1892), by Luigi Nono.png

English: In 1892 the Revoltella Museum purchased the work Ave Maria (Hail Mary) by Luigi Nono at the Munich International Exposition, a work particularly loved by the author as he had placed his wife and child there. There is represented a commoner with a child in her arms, praying at the foot of a statue of the Madonna that adorns the balustrade overlooking the Perotolo di Chioggia canal. Nono had treated the same subject ten years earlier in the painting Refugium peccatorum, purchased by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. As in the latter, even in the work exhibited here only the base of the statue is depicted, as if to underline the comparison between the marble Virgin and the carnal mother who "in her monumental prominence has the dignity of a Madonna of the people" (Pavanello ). Since the years of his training - accomplished at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he befriended the Venetian Favretto - Luigi Nono opted for social realism, permeated by an intimate and reflective vein in particular after a stay in Paris, during which he had known the paintings of Corot and Millet.