Segantini 14: Le due madri – Die beiden Mütter, 1889

Giovanni Segantini was ambivalent towards his mother: «I carry her in my memory, my mother; [...] this high figure, as she walked along tiredly. She was beautiful; not like dawn or noon, but like a sunset in spring." (From Giovanni Segantini's autobiography.) Segantini longed for the beautiful strong mother, but apparently felt that she did not have the (life) strength that he would have needed so urgently as a child.

Segantini glorifies the mother-child relationship between humans and animals in various works. In it, he expresses an unquenched longing for security. To be seen, for example, in "The Two Mothers" with two mother-child pairs or in "Ave Maria at the crossing". The later painted works such as "The Evil Mothers" and "The Punishment of the Lustful" have a completely different effect. According to the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham, in these later works he expresses the anger towards his mother, who had left him so early.