Studio: international art (36.1906)

Ettore Tito

Tito has painted women in every conceivable
attitude : bargaining, chaffing, making love. On
the Piazza of St. Mark gives us two girls idling
amid the thin mists of autumn : one in a red shawl,
with tea-roses in her chestnut hair, her face—in
three-quarter profile—touched with bronze reflected
lights; the other in brownish-yellow drapery.
Both girls appear to be listening to the compliments
of some admirer not visible in the picture,

The artist has been repeatedly inspired by the
poetry of the lagoons. In one picture a fisherman is
sailing his boat, his hand on the tiller, his pipe in
his mouth; he leans against the left side of the
boat, gazing into the distance with keen eyes.
The water is grey-green, the sun hidden in clouds,
the light thunderous : a broadly treated pictorial
synthesis. In his Rowers of the Lagoon (in the
Buda-Pesth Gallery) he tackled a difficult colour-
problem : the perspective

of the water’s surface, the
rose-colour and deep blue
of the light, are beautifully
rendered ; the pure briny
atmosphere seems to per-
meate even the accessories
of the boat; one literally
revels in the symphony of
colour. The yellow sail of
a fisherman’s bark in the
background gives a lovely
note.

Tito also takes many sub-
jects from country-life. In
The Descent, apairof horses,
a sorrel and a grey, are being
guided by a girl who is hold-
ing the pole between them.

The moisture of the soil and
the teeming heavy atmo-
sphere are finely expressed.

In another picture cows
and goats are depicted with
snow-mountains in the back-
ground, while in yet another
he paints pack-horses, pain-
fully toiling out their last
days of life. He has an
observant eye for animal
form, and particularly for
the movements of animals.

I have already said that
Tito is one of the few
Italians who understand
the nude, and must now

mention a life-size work, The Wheel of Fortune, the
conception of which recalls Burne-Jones’s picture
of the same name. Can Tito have seen this latter ?
The nude figures on the upper part of the wheel are
among the best ever executed by the Italian artist.
In the Birth of Venus much delicate feeling is
likewise to be descried, as in the expressive kiss of
Venus rising above the waves in the middle section.

Tito has been accused of being no poet, a dictum
which to a certain extent I cannot contravene,
though people seem to forget that in external nature
there is also a poetry of colour. This is a poetry
with which Tito must undoubtedly sympathise, else
he could not possibly conjure up the spirit of
Nature on his canvas as he does. And has he not
often given to his heads of women a certain trait
of lyric sadness ?

It is related of Tito that he once said casually to