This large oil studio is placed chronologically at a key moment in the history of Italian modern art and offers an unprecedented glimpse into the creative processes of Giulio Aristide Sartorio, one of the protagonists of painting in Rome between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A precocious opening to art produced beyond the Italian borders contributed to the numerous international successes and recognitions that the painter obtained. Art with which he had learned to deal with well before the establishment in 1895 of the Venice Biennale (whose exhibitions allowed our artists, without having to travel, to update their language in the light of what was happening in the rest of the world). In fact, it was Sartorio, already in the mid-1880s, who spread to Rome with his art those symbolist tendencies that would have characterized much of Italian painting between the two centuries. «Of England it was known that little bit of prerafaelism [sic] that Sartorio had spread in his first maniera by illustrating in paintings and drawings the poems by D'Annunzio » ^[1] , wrote the critic Ugo Ojetti in 1901 referring to the knowledge of foreign art in Italy before 1895. The interest in the painting of Victorian England before and in German Symbolism then, together with a profound knowledge of the Italian Renaissance tradition, led Sartorio to develop a complex and original pictorial language, permeated with cultured references to literature, history and mythology. A stately and refined painting, with which the artist hoped for the achievement of a national style that, unlike other European countries such as France or England, Italy was struggling to identify due to the unshakable regionalisms of the various schools in the North and South.

It was in the creation of large decorative cycles that the painter was able to fully express his renewed vision of art. Sartorio, who had already dealt with painting intended for the decoration of architectures in his youth, committed many of his energies to the creation of friezes starting from 1903, and in particular from 1908 to 1913, that is to say the five years in which he worked on the famous frieze of the Parliament.

If the frieze for the Sala del Lazio of the fifth Venice Biennale, quickly completed in collaboration with some young Roman painters [2], was quite simple in his theory of cherubs and festoons, in the following ones Sartorio would have created increasingly articulated compositions, enlivened by a large number of figures portrayed in the most diverse attitudes. The friezes prior to the Parliament are all monochrome: this choice, due to the artist's desire to recall the marble reliefs of he classical antiquity, in particular those of the Ara Pacis, which began to re-emerge thanks to the excavations begun in 1903 following the studies of the German archaeologist Friedrich von Duhn. To help in the composition and analytical study of the effects of muscle tension of his posing models, Sartorio made extensive use of photography  [3] –media in which he had been strongly interested for over a decade, as documented by his registration in 1893 at the Associazione Amatori di Fotografia in Rome- using a series of expedients such as having the figures lay on the ground and then photograph them from above, or even wet the clothes of those dressed to enhance the adherence of fabrics to the shapes of the bodies.

The commitment made by Sartorio in the design of decorative cycles is also testified by the presence of numerous sketches, some even of considerable size - proof, among other things, of a considerable investment of resources - like the one in question. Already exhibited at the 2001 exhibition at the Chiostro del Bramante on Italian Art Nouveau, the oil on canvas study presented here, in its extemporaneous and at the same time surprisingly precise rendering, reveals an expressive power and a creative inspiration such as to deny that belated line of criticism that wants to limit itself to seeing in the Sartorian friezes nothing more than a manifestation of rhetoric. The work is attributable to an initial phase of design for the frieze of the Sala del Lazio at the Venice Biennale in 1907 and reveals several affinity with the one created the previous year for the Sala del Lazio at the “Mostra Nazionale di Belle Arti ”in Milan (fig .1).

The 1907 frieze consists of fifteen parts - ten vertical format panels, four large main canvases and an entrance arch - and visually narrates the Poem of life through the representation of opposites alternated by ten brushes with caryatids representing Grace and Art supported by a virile nude symbolizing male energy (fig. 2), the four main frames represent respectively Light, Darkness, Love and Death (fig. 3). The study presented here seems to be connected to the Light panel, and in particular, as the figures holding hands seem to suggest, to the lower band representing the dance of the hours (fig. 4) celebrating the birth of a new life, represented instead in the upper band.

The theme of the dance of the hours, already presented by Gaetano Previati at the 1899 Venice Biennale in the famous painting today at the National Gallery of Modern Art, is interpreted by Sartorio with a distinctly Central European taste. Among the numerous trips he took abroad, the German one was undoubtedly one of the most important for the development of his pictorial language. From 1896 to 1899 he stayed in Weimer, invited by Grand Duke Charles Alexander of Saxony to teach painting at the School of Fine Arts, and visited the major German art cities observing the local art scene with interest. Literature has in fact underlined the influence, in Sartorian painting, of the production of “Deutsch-Römer” such as Max Klinger and Otto Greiner [4]. The estimate demonstrated by Sartorio in comparisons of the latter is well documented [5] and is the basis of some solutions adopted by the Roman painter in his the friezes: for example the rhythmic scan of the figures, which bring to mind famous Greinerian engravings such as The dance ( fig . 5), as well as the position of some nudes and, more generally, the analytical rendering of the muscles.

Such a heterogeneity of references and suggestions makes the framing of the Sartorio of friezes within historiographic labels particularly difficult: there is very little of the grace of international liberty, in the dramatic contrasts between lights and shadows and in the realism of bodies in motion. "But in any case you will want to judge some somewhat enigmatic themes and their representative result is not always clear", wrote Michele De Benedetti, "however it will satisfy the line of compositions, in which the concern for decorative harmony has perhaps not been constant enough, or the somewhat sickly and uniform elegance of the crowd of nude figures has been liked, no one, I repeat, will not want to recognize that the effort made by Sartorio in a few months of work worthily reminds us of those centuries of healthy, splendid artistic fecundity in which not the small easel canvas, but the walls of the palaces, the domes of the churches were the open field to the inexhaustible energy of of the artist and the glories of our painting » [6] .

Manuel Carrera

April 2019