Studio: international art (88.1924)

ROME

ROME.—One of the individual dis-
play^ which deservedly created most
interest among the more discerning por-
tion of the visitors to the Venice Biennial
of this year was Sala V., containing forty-
eight paintings by Armando Spadini. In
my own notice in these columns in Sep-
tember last I alluded to the extraordinary
pictorial merit of these paintings, to their
quality of immense sensibility in material
objects. This group of paintings are finely
representative of the artist, but Spadini
is a figure of such individual merit and
importance in modern Italian art that I
wish here to give^him a closer and more
detailed study. 0000

"boy holding cat"
by armando spadini

(Colin, of Comm. Avv. Fiano)

352

"annetta reading"
by armando spadini

(Colin, of Comm. Avv. Fiano)

The son of an optician, Armando
Spadini had shown from the first a
strong leaning to art; he had worked
under Fattori, and had studied the
treasures which the galleries of Florence
contain before he arrived at Rome with
the prize of the Pensionato Artistico
Nazionale. In those early days he had
evidently been strongly influenced by the
rich glowing colour of the old Venetian
masters, whose message finds perhaps an
echo in his Finding of Moses which
appeared this year in the Venice Biennial;
but in Rome the new influences which
were entering Italy—more directly through
these Venice exhibitions—claimed his at-
tention and influenced his art. 0 0

Not perhaps so much in the advanced
note touched by Cezanne, Van Gogh or
Matisse as in the art of Manet and Renoir
did this new influence come to him, and
suggest that loose technique, those, flesh
tones of pearl and rose which delight us
in his later work. In this last he seems to
find his inspiration in scenes of domes-
ticity, and to paint woman, as the mother,
and young children with a freshness, a
truth to nature and a rich palette which
places him alone in this field of subject.
Indeed his whole Sala V. at Venice gave
an impression of domesticity, of being
introduced as a privileged visitor into the
family nursery, which was almost too