Maestri della figurazione

[Autom. eng. transl.] The essay, included in the catalog of the exhibition held in 2013 at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia, presents one of the sections of the exhibition itself, dedicated to the Italian art scene from the period between the two world wars, within which, beyond of the variety of experiences that characterize it, it is possible to identify some fundamental lines of development and aggregation, which represent different declinations of that climate of "return to order" widespread throughout Europe. First of all, a metaphysical trend, embodied above all by Giorgio de Chirico, who, from the end of the '10s, is aimed at recovering the figurative roots and the "trade", that is, a technical skill that allows comparison with the masters of the past. Another address, led by Margherita Sarfatti as a theorist and organizer, coincides with the "Italian Twentieth Century" group: in its original nucleus, which has a charismatic leader in Mario Sironi, it advocates the myth of the "primordio" and of a "modern classicism" of great plastic vigor. Finally, between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the heterogeneous association of the "Italiens de Paris" (again de Chirico, with Gino Severini and others), supported above all by the critic Waldemar George and the gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg , proposes a clear "Mediterranean classicism". Then there were more circumscribed experiences, although of undoubted value, such as that of magical Realism, theorized by Massimo Bontempelli and practiced by Casorati and an outsider of genius such as Cagnaccio di San Pietro, champion of an analytical, cold, objective painting, but animated by a sense of estrangement and suspension. The case of Giorgio Morandi and his ascetic still lifes is particular and separate, constituting a meticulous investigation of perceptive relations between object and subject, in the search for a rule that gives rise to the coherence of the relationship between the order very thoughtful of the forms and imperceptible variations of color. Instead Antonietta Raphaël Mafai (Lithuanian by birth, English by culture, Roman by choice) is the author of sculptures of concentrated purity and plasticity, which combine, in the ways of an original figuration, multiple and disparate suggestions, from Rodin to Epstein.