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Francesco Mazzaferro
Gino Severini and the Sacred Art in a European Context:
The Influence of Cennini’s Book of the Art
Part Three
[Original Version: May 2016 - New version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 16) The edition of the Book of the Art 1933, edited by Renzo Simi |
The echo of Severini's religious art in Italy
and his participation at the Fifth Milan Triennial
The echo of
the Swiss works and the writings in the journal "Nova et Vetera" came loud and strong in Italy, with whom
Severini had never severed relations. While he was one of the "Italians in
Paris", he was not living abroad because of ideological dissent and was
not considered a political exile.
When
Margherita Sarfatti wrote about the artist in her famous "History of Modern Painting" in 1930,
it was precisely the theme of the frescoes on which she dwelled, and for which she
considered him as having a peculiar profile from the other Italian painters in
Paris. "In the Italian group of the «Paris school» I would like to list Giorgio De Chirico, Mario Tozzi,
Massimo Campigli, Paresce, Licini, De Pisis, and in a broad sense also Gino
Severini, although he belongs rather to other trends. Gino Severini was born in
Pienza [note of the
editor: actually, he was born in Cortona], near
Siena, but has lived since long in Paris; nevertheless, he maintains a Tuscan
sense of gracefulness and decorative grace. Already when he was futurist, he was
one of the first ones to feel the appeal of the classic, if for classic are
also meant, as it is right, our primitive fresco painters. Many years ago, he
sketched on the walls of a Paris dancing club, as a very young painter with bold
decorative habitus, the bacchanal of the frenzied dance of the then fashionable
Pan-Pan. Today, he is one of the few who had the courage, the strength and also
the opportunity to experience in practice, in the decoration of a Swiss
cathedral, the theoretical nostalgia for the wall composition and the painting
of sacred subjects in a good fresco." [76]
Accompanied
in 1932 by Cipriano Efisio Oppo (1891-1962), the Director of the Exhibition of
the Fascist Revolution, Severini was received by Mussolini in Rome and
highlighted his desire to work at public commissions in Italy [77]. The same
year, the journal Daedalus directed
by Ugo Ojetti devoted an article in which Jean Cassou (1897-1986), the French
writer and art historian, called him "an
Italian master, a Catholic artist (...), a man of great culture, an authentic
humanist" [78]. Of course, his ideas on fresco and religious mosaic were
not perfectly aligned with those prevailing in Italy, where mural painting mainly
had a celebratory value for the regime. But when the Fifth Triennial, with a
theme related to mural painting, was organized in Milan, Severini certainly could
not be missing, and indeed Angelo Bordoni, Antonio Carminati and Mario Sironi (the
Triennial’s curators) gave him a position of honour. The Ceremonial Hall, hosting
the inauguration by the king, ended in fact with Severini’s mosaic
The Arts, surrounded by the fresco The Italian culture by Giorgio De
Chirico, and located almost in an apse position.
Severini
applied to this secular fresco all the principles established for religious
painting in the two articles of 1927. Both Severini and De Chirico preached the
return to order and to craft, but their references were really different: for
the former, one should return to the iconographic models of the frontal and
hieratic art of the Middle Ages, for the latter one should adopt the
foreshortening of the fifteenth century’s Renaissance. The structure of Severini’s
mosaic was nothing but a modern transfiguration of the representation of a
Madonna on the throne of our fourteenth century. On the throne, here triumphed the
architecture (as we have already seen, the mother of all arts according to
Severini), between painting (with the compass and the palette) and the
sculpture, who were standing, while music and literature were sitting down.
Unlike De Chirico did in his fresco, Severini did not depict in the mosaic any perspective
nor illusionistic effects (he did not want to ‘open’ the wall); the use of
colour was dominated by the idea of accomplishing a harmonious combination of shades of blue
and brown, while the use of line was entirely subordinate to achieving that
goal. The decoration with Italian towns, above the five arts, had only a
complementary role, being the equivalent of the old peak in Gothic
representations; it anticipated the style of the representations of St. Peter
and Lausanne in the apse fresco of the Notre-Dame du Valentin Basilica in
Lausanne, which began in September of that year [79].
It is just sufficient to look at the remaining pictures of the different murals
displayed at the 1933 Triennial (all lost with the exception of Severini's
mosaic) to understand that his radical position on the need to make painting fully
reliant from architecture was not shared by the other artists. Yet, the
integration of the work of architects and painters will become crucial in the
Thirties to give monumental value to artworks as a propaganda tool.
Anyway, in
1933 Italian art was really dominated by the idea of a social and public painting
on the wall. Think of the Manifesto della
Pittura murale (Manifesto of Mural Painting) of 1933, a real hymn to
fascist art, drafted by Mario Sironi and also signed by Campigli, Carrà and Funi
[80]; in the same year Corrado Cagli wrote the article “Muri ai pittori” (Walls to
painters) [81] clearly inspired by the plea of Aurier,
1891, which we already had occasion to cite. With their writings Sironi and
Cagli animated a heated controversy on fresco techniques, but also revealed
that they had been influenced by the theoretical work that Severini had begun a
decade earlier in Switzerland.
The 1933 Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini
In 1933 was
also republished the 1913 edition of the Book
of the Art by Renzo Simi, showing that - in the year when the Fifth Triennial
was dedicated to the fresco and rival art manifestos were published to support
the public use of that technique – there was a strong commercial demand in
Italy behind the interest for the mediaeval teaching provided by Cennino. The
edition of 1933 had a wide success, possibly also among the artists who were
the farthest to the classicist sensibility and the retour to order. Not
surprisingly, a publication on the library of the painter Renato Birolli
(1905-1959), which I could see at a recent exhibition in Turin [82], offers a
rare picture of the 1933 edition of the Libro
dell'Arte [83]. Birolli was a painter of an art school which I consider stylistically distant from that of Severini (at least in those years, he was clearly inspired by German
expressionism and French fauvisme),
but obviously Cennino could not miss in his library. The curator Alessandro
Della Latta believes that the reading occurred shortly after 1933; he did not
associate it with the debate on the fresco, but with Birolli's interest for the art
of the primitives, also reflecting the teaching of Lionello Venturi.
Perhaps by
some coincidence only, in 1933 the Book
of the Art was published not only in Italy but had its greatest
international success. Two new versions were released, in fact: the American version by Daniel Thompson and the Russian one. The reason for such a global
success of a simple book of recipes by a late mediaeval/early Renaissance
painter was perhaps linked to the role in the management of the economy and social affairs (and also in
the promotion of painting as social activity). Thompson's translation, in the
framework of a program of support to the painters funded by the New Deal, was
linked to the initiatives of large American foundations - financed by public
funds – to promote mural commissions at a time when American artists were
literally doomed to starvation because of the terrible recession. And the
publication in Moscow, in the framework of the Russian translation by Soviet
authorities of all the main Italian art treaties, confirmed the imperial and
classicist ambitions of Stalinist art and wanted to reiterate that, in a time
of great crisis of the capitalist model, when its fate itself was uncertain,
the future of art belonged to the communist model. In the same months, Italian
fascism claimed the connection to old Italian fresco as heritage of its own
identity. Since this is the period in which art and artists had more need of public
money to survive, political power had a unique opportunity of taking control of
it (as a tool for propaganda and legitimation). The Book of the Art of Cennino made no exception, and became an indirect
instrument for competition between different types of social action: in Italy,
the United States and the Soviet Union.
Severini
after the Swiss experience
The reason
may well be that the Swiss frescoes cannot be transferred and exposed in the
exhibitions of our cities, that Fribourg and its suburbs are not among the
usual travel destinations of our tourists, or that our society experienced a
progressive secularization. Whatever the cause, Severini is certainly not known
in Italy for the religious painting of fresco that he produced for ten years in
several parishes in Western Switzerland [84].
The ten
years of religious art of the Compagnie
de Saint-Luc (animated by ambitions of
renewal of religious life under the influence of Maritain), ended in the
mid-thirties, when the flow of ecclesiastical commissions coming from the rich parishes
around Fribourg stopped. One cannot forget that these works of decorative and
monumental art required significant public and private investment, which after
the general crisis of Western economies in 1929 became more and more meagre also
in Switzerland.
More
generally, the serious economic downturn blew everywhere the speculative bubble
born in the twenties, just after the First World War: in the years of
hyperinflation and geopolitical uncertainties, the avant-garde paintings had
become one of the most popular safe-haven assets, letting prices skyrocket and
making the fortune of the young painters and above all of the traders. After
the market crash on Wall Street, the flow of liquidity of those large investors
who wanted to hoard wealth in artwork was interrupted unexpectedly, many
traders got bankrupt and the artists became more economically dependent on the
state: the Italian painters of Paris went back to Italy, attracted, for
example, by public commissions such as the aforementioned Fifth Milan Triennial
of 1933, dedicated to monumental art as a form of support for the regime's
policies.
If in 1933
Severini had wanted to differentiate himself, at least stylistically, from the
other artists who had adopted a more celebratory painting at the Triennial,
after a few years he had to adjust to the fact that he was now living in Italy
and had to depend on the regime. Nevertheless, his neo-byzantine style remained
unique (see the allegories of justice in Milan's Palace of Justice): the time of religious art had passed, but the
reference to mediaeval iconography was still persistent. In 1935, he won the Second Quadriennial of National Art. It
followed, the one after the other, other numerous public commissions which were
increasingly linked to the regime, such as mosaics for the Palestra del Duce (Duce's Gym)
at the Foro Mussolini, started in 1936 and inaugurated with Mussolini, and the
entire leadership of the party in 1941. In the second half of the thirties he
also worked, under the direction of Piacentini, precisely at the frescoes for
the Palace of Justice in Milan (1937-1939).
Some references to the preference for medieval art - albeit very veiled - came back
even in the Mosaic at the Post Office
in Alexandria (1940-1941), perhaps the work where he most recovered the old
futuristic tones. The religious themes will return only after the war, in the early
fifties.
Epilogue 1942-1944
The events
of the war engulfed the entire intellectual world, and it is no surprise that
the same was true for Severini.
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| Fig.17) The second edition of the Reasoning on figurative art, in 1942 |
In 1942,
during the war, a second version of the collection of essays Reasoning on figurative arts was
published, enriched with a new additional, and very demanding, introduction with
a clear neo-Thomist orientation: in the new pages, the artist reflected on
primitivism, transcendence, poetry and art rules, trying to fly high and to
reflect on the fundamental issues of art with a philosophical reflection.
However, the text still displayed a substantial adherence to fascism.
The regime
collapsed in 1943. In 1944 was released a new collection of essays entitled Arte indipendente, arte borghese, arte
sociale (Independent Art, bourgeois art, social art), published by Danesi Editore in Via Margutta (Danesi
Publisher in Rome’s Margutta Street), which opened the series “I Libri di Via Margutta. Scritti di artisti”
(The Books of Margutta Street. Writings of artists) [86].
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| Fig. 18) Gino Severini, Independent art, bourgeois art, social art, 1944 |
In the introduction,
Severini wrote of a meeting of anti-fascist intellectuals in Rome, still in the
days of the Nazi occupation, when a young woman was shot by the Nazis close to
the meeting place, while trying to snatch her husband from a roundup of the SS
(it reads like the famous scene concluding the neorealist film Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini in
1945); two days later, two fascist were lynched by angry mob in the same place by
reprisal. Terrified by this explosion of violence, the artist put a question to
his interlocutors, during a meeting chaired by an anonymous "young
writer": "whether art is the metaphysical
expression of the world". However, he got the following dismissive reply
from him: “there is no need, I think, to
point out what art is, otherwise one would go for long." Severini
believed instead that events required it to reflect on the role of art and
wondered why none of the Italian artists had protested against the outbreak of
war only a few years before. Therefore, he did not want to escape this essential theme. Moreover he confronted himself with (but also rebuffed) the Communist objection against
modern art, considered a bourgeois art. A large part of the book was devoted to Severini’s
rejection of the Soviet Union's figurative experience - explaining that the
Stalinist world had destroyed any autonomy of the Russian avant-garde art,
whose escaped leaders Severini knew well, having made their acquaintance in
Paris. If Severini rejected the communist ideology, he asked himself nevertheless how art could take responsibility to recognise the social needs of the masses, being
inspired by the social doctrine of the church and the teaching of Maritain.
Not
surprisingly, the text included some beautiful pages dedicated to Renoir and
his letter of 1911 to Henri Mottez to comment Cennini’s Book of the Art. Renoir, in his radical pessimism, had been one of
the few to notice the degeneration going on in the art world, more and more
subject to rampant commercialization that fed an unlimited attention-seeking behaviour,
created incentives for aesthetic excesses and ignored the societal needs. And
yet, the same Renoir had realized that it was impossible to re-create the pre-conditions of
Renaissance art and social solidarity, by the simple fact that society
had lost the cohesion of the Middle Ages and in particular the collective
belief in religion. So, for Severini, there was a perfect parallelism between
the reasons and the developments of art and those of society. If a collapse of
society had occurred in the last decades, it was also because there had been an
inability of art to respond to the people’s needs. He was totally convinced
that the years of market speculation in the twenties had been expressions of a
greedy and ruthless world. He also understood that - once the speculative
bubble exploded - the Italian avant-garde, including himself, had willingly
placed itself at the service of a liberticidal regime, but wanted to avoid
falling back to the service of a new freedom-restricting regime that would
enslave art. He believed therefore that a return to his religious experience of
the twenties was the only response to the new challenges. Browsing Severini’s
writing in 1944, I almost had the impression of reading a text of cultural
foundation of the Christian Democrats. Here are his conclusions, after the long
discussion on Renoir: "The social
conditions in which art has to live, since Renoir on, through the capitalist
dictatorships or the ideological totalitarianisms, and then after the war, have
come to a culminating point, beyond which there is either the annihilation of
the art, whose agony can last a few more years, or the revival of the art, whose
bases are thrown but which will never become a solid building, and adhere to
the entire modern life, if we do not act in the sense in which we must act.
(...) People should realize that they are indispensable in the world; that the material
world is nothing without them, that material dynamism is nothing compared to
the dynamism of a conscious man, a man who thinks. People should resume confidence in
themselves and in their eternity" [87]. And Severini entrusted to art, religion and poetry the task "of a new and
miraculous departure" [88].
[Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, images of the artworks by Gino Severini cannot be shown anymore in the new version of this article.]
NOTES
[76] Sarfatti, Margherita G., Storia della pittura moderna (History of modern painting). Roma, Paolo Cremonese Editore, 1930, 164 pages with 75 tables outside text. Quotation at page 84
[77] Benzi, Fabio – Gino Severini. Affreschi, mosaici, decorazioni monumentali (Gino Severini. Frescoes, mosaics, monumental decorations), 1921-1941, Roma, Galleria Arco Farnese, 12 May-30 June 1992, Roma, Leonardo-De Luca Editori, 119 pages. Quotation at page 62.
[78] See:
http://www.docstar.sns.it/dedalo/scheda.php?id=7911&&indice=titoloarticolo&&voce=Il%20pittore%20Gino%20Severini
[79] Benzi, Fabio – Gino Severini. Affreschi,.. (quoted), p. 62.
[80] M. Sironi, A. Funi, M. Campigli, C. Carrà – Manifesto della Pittura Murale, in “Colonna”, Year I, 1933, N. 1, pp. 10-11
[81] Cagli, Corrado – Muri ai pittori, in “Quadrante”, I, 1, May 1933
[82] See: http://www.museofico.it/mostre/renato-birolli-figure-e-luoghi-1930-1959/
[83] Renato Birolli. Biblioteca, edited by Alessandro Della Latta, Scalpendi, 2014, 208 pages.
[84] An exception is the beautiful exhibition catalogue Gino Severini. Affreschi, mosaici, decorazioni monumentali, 1921-1941 (Gino Severini. Frescoes, mosaics, monumental decorations, 1921-1941), Roma, Galleria Arco Farnese, Leonardo De Luca, Roma, 1992 and in particular the introductory essay Gino Severini. The monumental works by Fabio Benzi. Other Italian texts on the subject are listed by Zoë Marie Jones in her fine article already cited in footnote 31: Mascherpa, Giorgio - Gino Severini pittore "Sacro" (The painter Gino Severini as "sacred" artist), exhibition catalogue, 5 to 28 March 1981, Cultural Center San Fedele, Milan, Hoepli, 1981; Mascherpa, Giorgio - Gli anni venti: Severini religioso (The Twenties: Religious Severini), in: Gino Severini, annotated catalogue, edited by Daniela Fonti, Milan, Arnaldo Mondadori Editore, 1988, pp. 347-351; Garrone, Emanuela - Gino Severini muralista sacro (Gino Severini as sacred muralist), in: Sixth Biennial of Sacred Art, the exhibition catalogue, San Gabriele, Fondazione Stauros Italiana, 1994, pp. 368-403.
[85] Severini, Gino – Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (Reasoning on figurative arts), Milano, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, 1942, p. 299. Quotation at p. XVIII.
[86] In 1945 the Danesi Publisher released in the same series, the Credo d’Artista (Creed of the Artist) by Luigi Bartolini. There was also a series entitled Quaderni di Storia dell’Arte (History of Art Notebooks), directed by Valerio Mariani, with a rich production of texts in 1945 (for example, Cinquant'anni di pittura moderna in Francia, i.e. Fifty years of modern painting in France, edited by Giorgio of San Lazzaro; Luigi Grassi’s Bernini pittore (Bernini as painter), Giovanni Fallani’s Fra Angelico).
[87] Severini, Gino – Arte indipendente, arte borghese, arte sociale, Roma, Danesi in Via Margutta – Editore, 1944, 87 pages. Quotation at page 68.
[88] Severini, Gino – Arte indipendente... (quoted), p. 68.
[77] Benzi, Fabio – Gino Severini. Affreschi, mosaici, decorazioni monumentali (Gino Severini. Frescoes, mosaics, monumental decorations), 1921-1941, Roma, Galleria Arco Farnese, 12 May-30 June 1992, Roma, Leonardo-De Luca Editori, 119 pages. Quotation at page 62.
[78] See:
http://www.docstar.sns.it/dedalo/scheda.php?id=7911&&indice=titoloarticolo&&voce=Il%20pittore%20Gino%20Severini
[79] Benzi, Fabio – Gino Severini. Affreschi,.. (quoted), p. 62.
[80] M. Sironi, A. Funi, M. Campigli, C. Carrà – Manifesto della Pittura Murale, in “Colonna”, Year I, 1933, N. 1, pp. 10-11
[81] Cagli, Corrado – Muri ai pittori, in “Quadrante”, I, 1, May 1933
[82] See: http://www.museofico.it/mostre/renato-birolli-figure-e-luoghi-1930-1959/
[83] Renato Birolli. Biblioteca, edited by Alessandro Della Latta, Scalpendi, 2014, 208 pages.
[84] An exception is the beautiful exhibition catalogue Gino Severini. Affreschi, mosaici, decorazioni monumentali, 1921-1941 (Gino Severini. Frescoes, mosaics, monumental decorations, 1921-1941), Roma, Galleria Arco Farnese, Leonardo De Luca, Roma, 1992 and in particular the introductory essay Gino Severini. The monumental works by Fabio Benzi. Other Italian texts on the subject are listed by Zoë Marie Jones in her fine article already cited in footnote 31: Mascherpa, Giorgio - Gino Severini pittore "Sacro" (The painter Gino Severini as "sacred" artist), exhibition catalogue, 5 to 28 March 1981, Cultural Center San Fedele, Milan, Hoepli, 1981; Mascherpa, Giorgio - Gli anni venti: Severini religioso (The Twenties: Religious Severini), in: Gino Severini, annotated catalogue, edited by Daniela Fonti, Milan, Arnaldo Mondadori Editore, 1988, pp. 347-351; Garrone, Emanuela - Gino Severini muralista sacro (Gino Severini as sacred muralist), in: Sixth Biennial of Sacred Art, the exhibition catalogue, San Gabriele, Fondazione Stauros Italiana, 1994, pp. 368-403.
[85] Severini, Gino – Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (Reasoning on figurative arts), Milano, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, 1942, p. 299. Quotation at p. XVIII.
[86] In 1945 the Danesi Publisher released in the same series, the Credo d’Artista (Creed of the Artist) by Luigi Bartolini. There was also a series entitled Quaderni di Storia dell’Arte (History of Art Notebooks), directed by Valerio Mariani, with a rich production of texts in 1945 (for example, Cinquant'anni di pittura moderna in Francia, i.e. Fifty years of modern painting in France, edited by Giorgio of San Lazzaro; Luigi Grassi’s Bernini pittore (Bernini as painter), Giovanni Fallani’s Fra Angelico).
[87] Severini, Gino – Arte indipendente, arte borghese, arte sociale, Roma, Danesi in Via Margutta – Editore, 1944, 87 pages. Quotation at page 68.
[88] Severini, Gino – Arte indipendente... (quoted), p. 68.
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