| When Michetti made this large painting, at the age of 29, he was a successful artist on the threshold of maturity, already known to the public and critics for having executed some important paintings, such as The procession of Corpus Domini, of 1877, and The fishing for rods, from 1878, as well as a large series of shepherdesses and subjects of genre variously inspired by the rites and folklore of the land of Abruzzo. For the young artist it is time to go beyond Palizzian naturalism, perfectly assimilated together with the luministic conquests of the School of Portici and the anecdotal effect of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, in view of the experimentation of a new and striking poetics of the image, supported by ever more daring perspective cuts and a pictorial material vibrant with light.
Chronologically attributable to the first demanding and large-format works and characterized by a narrative development that takes place, with surprising anticipation, as in a cinema screen, the painting depicts the funeral by the sea of two twin babies, a sad event to which the author he must have really witnessed, translated into pictorial images of touching suggestion. Presented at the National Exhibition of Turin in 1880 with two other paintings, Impressions on the Adriatic and the aforementioned The fishing of clams, the painting obtained the favor of the most advanced critics for the novelty of the theme and the freshness of the image. A great communicator and virtuous artist, Michetti nevertheless translates a painful event into a composed and serene procession, since death is not seen as a fatal event, but as the link of an entire life cycle that refers to nature; Christian and pagan elements therefore merge into a substantially calm if not joyful vision of life, in an era in which infant deaths, still quite frequent, were associated with the inevitability of destiny, often becoming a source of artistic inspiration. The theme was therefore particularly felt and Michetti himself was very close to his friend Edoardo Dalbono when he lost a son to diphtheria, which was then widespread. The work is cited later, with keen appreciation, by Gabriele D'Annunzio in an article in the Fanfulla della Domenica on January 14, 1883, dedicated moreover to the presentation of Il voto, Michetti's most discussed painting, at the International Exhibition in Rome. ; the poet, who will draw inspiration from the subject of I morticelli to describe a funeral on the beach in the stanzas of his Canto Novo, remembers "the intense blue of sky and sea", seeing in it "the first powerful manifestation of pain", after the celebration of an idyllic and pastoral nature that distinguishes the first phase of Michetti's poetics. The work was followed in 1884 by an autograph replica, Il morticino, now in the Ricci-Oddi collection in Piacenza: the latter differs from the first version for minimal variations, such as the subject (a single baby instead of two) and the use of a color scheme with generally duller and more melted tones, due to the wide use of tempera which, together with pastel, becomes more and more frequent (AC Tommasi, Francesco Paolo Michetti, in Reading the art, edited by S. Fugazza, Piacenza 2002). Almost immediately all trace of the first version was lost: after the exhibitions in Turin and London it was placed on the amateur market, probably by Goupil, Michetti's trusted dealer. In the 1930s Sillani mentions it in his monograph as belonging to an American collection (T. Sillani, Francesco Paolo Michetti, Rome 1932). Returning to Italy around the 1950s, it was first acquired by the "Mendel" Institute of Twinology in Rome, then by private collectors, until its entry into the collections of the National Museum of Abruzzo, thanks to a new acquisition policy supported by Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities.
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