Prayer

Inside a church, a mother kneels in prayer, hands clasped and head bowed, accompanied by her young daughter seated on the floor. The woman’s despair and her need to cling to faith are powerfully conveyed in this scene, tinged with deep melancholy. The setting is described with simplicity; sunlight illuminates the presbytery in the background with a slanted beam of light, revealing the interior of the Church of Santa Lucia in Treviso.

A similar subject appears in an earlier painting, *Sine labe* (*Without Sin*), which Serena exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1897, as indicated by the inscription the artist placed in the lower right corner of this work. In that version, however, the mother and daughter found comfort in the presence of an angelic figure summoned by their plea; here, with divine intervention excluded, the focus shifts to the raw human drama of the two figures, left alone and abandoned.

In the final decade of the 19th century, Serena turned to themes of social realism, widely explored in Italy by artists such as Induno and Morbelli. In Venice, the same poetic attention to the humble was embraced and reinterpreted by his fellow student, Luigi Nono. The anguish of Serena’s *Victims* echoes Nono’s masterpiece, *Refugium peccatorum*, presented at the 1883 Rome Exhibition of Fine Arts, which garnered widespread acclaim and significantly influenced the “sentimental” artistic current.

Despite mixed critical reception and resistance from bourgeois collectors—who preferred genre scenes—Serena’s shift toward social themes reveals his engagement with emerging artistic trends. Although these works represent a relatively minor part of his output, they achieve a modern sense of dramatic expression, as seen in *The Death of Pierrot* (1897).

Thanks to his invited participation in the Venice Biennale and, earlier, the prize he received at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition (for *El stalo*), Serena earned recognition for his work, which alternated between local exhibitions and those of national and international scope.
The painting was purchased by the Municipality of Treviso in 1906 and became part of the civic collections then directed by Luigi Bailo.