Massimo Campigli e gli Etruschi. Una pagana felicità

In the rooms of the noble floor of ACP - Palazzo Franchetti, in Piazza San Marco, in Venice, on May 23, 2021, the exhibition "Massimo Campigli and the Etruscans - A pagan happiness" will be inaugurated, curated by Franco Calarota with the general supervision of Alessia Calarota , which wants to present itself as a true dialogue between the works of the master and the examples of the past from which he drew such strong inspiration.

«[...] In my paintings a pagan happiness entered both in the spirit of the subjects and in the spirit of the work which became more free and lyrical». It is with these words that Massimo Campigli himself describes the visit to the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome in 1928, attributing to it a fundamental value for the development of the more mature phase of his artistic production.

The approximately 35 works by Campigli selected for the exhibition are flanked by about fifty finds from the Etruscan civilization, many of which unpublished and exhibited here for the first time, identified by the Superintendent Margherita Eichberg together with the scholars of the Scientific Committee Leonardo Bochicchio, Simona Carosi, Daniele Federico Maras, Rossella Zaccagnini, flanked by the research director Arch. Giovanni Cesarini. The exhibition was also able to count on the precious scientific contribution of the art historian Martina Corgnati. The catalog, published by Silvana Editoriale, is completed with texts by Enrico Mascelloni and Eva Weiss.

A profound dialogue is established in the rooms of the noble floor of ACP - Palazzo Franchetti. The deliberately archaic compositions of Campigli, well represented in the exhibition with paintings ranging from 1928 to 1966, find the origins of their deepest inspiration in the Etruscan finds on display with which a natural sharing of atmospheres, signs and colors is established. As Franco Calarota points out: "Starting from the famous visit to the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome in 1928, we witness a sort of return to a primordial purity in the art of Campigli, to an ancient flavor made of soft colors like fresco paintings so similar to how time has given us back the Etruscan images, of forms shaped according to the design of votive statues or amphorae, of female figures with hourglass busts that abstract themselves into timeless images ”. Two works on display, "Bust with a blue vase" and "Zingari", are from 1928 and clearly mark the passage towards a new figuration, which becomes more and more evident in works such as "Donne con l'ombrellino" from 1940 until the "Seated Woman" from 1961.

The typological richness of the exhibits on display - from vases to figurines, from jewels to sarcophagi, etc. - allows you to trace an alphabet and a universe of links which, starting from general evocations, are declined in specific references in the various sections of the exhibition: the first dedicated to the human figure, divided into men and women; the second to animals, composed of birds, horses, wild animals and finally the third with shapes and geometries. Many of the exhibits are completely unpublished and come from important operations for the recovery of archaeological material, including from renowned international museums, and now in the availability of the Superintendence of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria. As Superintendent Margherita Eichberg writes: "terracotta faces were privileged, from which the artist drew inspiration for the creation of a stereotypical type of portrait, free from the direct reproduction of reality; bronzes and ceramic vases decorated with human figures (male and female) and animals, subjects that appear - almost quotations - in the artist's works; the bucchero and impasto vases with geometric and curved shapes that inspired the female silhouettes in some of her works; finally jewels, a true passion of Campigli. In addition, images of portraits from the painted tombs of Tarquinia were selected - and reproduced in the exhibition. " Two precious terracotta sarcophagi of the Civic Museum of Viterbo certainly deserve a note: a clay female sarcophagus from the second half of the third century. B.C. and a clay male sarcophagus from the end of the 3rd, beginning of the 2nd century B.C.... read the rest of the article»