PEr long the great wind that animates the frieze by Giulio Aristide Sartorio For the new classroom of the Parliament of the Palazzo di Montecitorio it has been overwhelmed by contrary winds. Even today that the painting of this great artist can be taken by many as a model, The name of Sartorio remains in dim or in the left light compared to that of artists consecrated to him coeval or subsequent.
If Lamberti in the History of art does not deny a pure space for the artist, Argan in his Modern art It does not even mention it, considering the experiences of Toti Scialoja, Colombo Manuella, by Francesco Somaini more significant. It is one of the paradoxes that have long weighed on our assessments of contemporary art.
The grandiose frieze of Sartorio for the classroom of Parliament is coeval of the first and most fertile developments of the futurist movement. Between 1910 and 1912 Boccioni fires works like The city that rises, matter, elasticity; Carlo Carrà, The funeral of the anarchist Galli And The galleries of Milan; Giacomo Balla the famous Dynamism of a dog on a leashand the Abstract speed.
This makes the heroic, mythological, triumphalistic frieze an enterprise of manneraimed at the past, at least in an evolutionary perspective of art history.
The resumption of interest for phenomena such as the painting of the pre-Raffaelliti, including the “anachronistic” mosaic decorations by Edward Burne-Jones for the church of San Paolo within the walls in Rome, has it today in a different and more responsible attitude towards Sartorio.
Visual ecstasy
We can appreciate in the irrigation and repetitiveness of his greater work a sort of self -propeller vitalism which is not dissimilar from the linguistic emphasis of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Paints and words like an unstoppable river that overwhelms in a sound flow and visual ecstasy Little by sudden flashes, from lyrical breaks that laugh vigor to rhythm and attention.
Giulio Aristide Sartorio: “The triumphant Italy”, 1908-1912, detail of the frieze in Montecitorio (photo Ansa).
Nor in D’Annunzio, nor in the Sartorio del Fregio the rhythm can be said properly narrative: for both the theme is absent because the real theme is the same to tell, beyond the symbols and allegories.
Sartorio chases a classic myth, an order of grace and apparently lost measure; His direct model is in the sculptures of Fidia for the Parthenon. But painting can compete with all the arts, and therefore the frieze of the parliament will be apparently monochrome, and in the vibrant intimate of mother -of -pearl colors, of kangiantisms that animate the wounds of the fidiar wet peples.
The realization of the Sartorio frieze
With Fidia Sartorio he looks to Michelangelo and Burne-Jones, in Mantegna and Botticelli. And it is singular that with its monumental to do, in the obliged gigantism, the painter maintains a finesse of execution worthy of the ancients or a Moreau, of a Böcklin, of a kinger.
Ugo Ojetti tells about Corriere della Sera of 6 October 1932 on the occasion of the death of Sartorio: «He was an alleged worker, of a meticulous punctuality. (…) For the frieze of Parliament he boasted, quietly, that he had painted, in 930 days, 285 figures of men and animals on 450 meters of canvas. He kept this canvas wrapped on a large roller right, and the painted canvas took a step every week, as the mechanics say, of many meters, not one less ».
It is the ease, the speed, in the tradition of the Luca Giordano and the Tiepolo, that left us admired in front of the great feat of Sartorio. Gigantism responds, before a rhetorical need, to a spatial needas for the ancient masters struggling with the proportions with respect to the great distances of the domes and ceilings. We think of the Cupola del Correggio in Parma, with the monumental figures of the Apostles.
The narrative theme
Sartorio is the heir of a great tradition, before the interpreter of an ideological program. The narrative theme is pretentious, and any allegorical reference is overwhelmed by the prevalence of the form in a continuous search for dynamism, energy, movement through a path very different from that of the futurists.
What characterizes, ultimately, all vast decoration is the genetic reproduction of the form without any modular repetition. In this Sartorio he perfectly emulates Fidia’s frieze, finding, beyond time and beyond the neoclassical purifications, the spirit. This is also the other evident characteristic: the extreme summary of the execution.
Sartorio does not cultivate a finished painting, but always sketched, nervous, flickering of clearly recognizable brushstrokes that reach the edge of the formal. The image, then, as well as in Giovanni Boldini, is recomposed, but perhaps more by virtue of the constant wave rhythm than for the strength of the individual elements.
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