Within the GAM, compliant and fragile women, who “remain in their place” and within the role indicated by society, are those portrayed in small genre paintings in the room dedicated to the poetics of “truth”.
Works set in humble but dignified interior spaces, of petty bourgeois or popular houses with intimate, domestic and sentimental tones: among these, for example, the mother with her child portrayed in A poor family, by Pietro Volpes (1866).
This female figure also corresponds to Lucia Mondella of the Betrothed who portray her, as in the work of Giuseppe Pensabene, Fra’ Cristoforo, Renzo and Lucia, a female character who has much in common with the protagonists of genre works, but who in the course of the novel he will see an inner transformation in which his complexity will emerge precisely because of the events he finds himself experiencing.