Giorgio Morandi

Visconte Franco Marmont du Haut Champ, Milan

Thence by descent to the present owner

Ernesto Montù, Capolavori dell'Arte Moderna Italiana, Carrà - De Chirico - Morandi - Sironi, Milan, 1950, illustrated pl. XV

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi. Dipinti, Catalogo generale 1948-1964, Milan, 1977, vol. I, no. 201, illustrated n.p.

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals a spot of retouching to the center of the extreme upper edge, and a few very minor lines to the upper right. Some light frame rubbing to the edges. There is a fine line of stable craquelure with some minor paint loss to the pink element in the lower centre. This work is in overall good original condition.
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Morandi painted landscapes throughout his life, often deriving inspiration from the countryside surrounding the small towns of Grizzana and Roffeno in the Bolognese Apennines. In Paesaggio the artist captures the brilliant sunlight and verdant greenery of this region through a blend of compact, geometric shapes and more lyrical swathes of paint, juxtaposing the crisp horizontals of the buildings against the softened contours of the surrounding fields. He simplifies and evokes the lyricism of the undulating hills so typical of the Italian countryside.

Working from the window of his studio or en plein air, often using binoculars or small cardboard ‘window frames’ to define his field of vision, Morandi varied his approach, sometimes depicting the subject in close up or – as in the present work – retreating to a hazy distance. In both cases this allowed him to reduce the subject to a few constituent, identifying elements, placing the emphasis on the formal properties of the works.    

This treatment of the subject reflects the rich and diverse artistic heritage that Morandi drew upon throughout his career. Like a number of his contemporaries, Morandi found inspiration in the great Quattrocento masters, Giotto, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca. The simple, coherent structure of their fresco paintings, together with the almost sculptural rendering of volume, had a significant influence on his painterly style. Equally, his use of shape and colour imply an almost Cézannian interpretation of pictorial space, and the influence of Cézanne is particularly apparent in his landscapes (fig. 1).

Indeed Morandi echoed some of the older artist’s own comments on art in an interview in 1955, explaining: ‘As Galileo recalled in his book of philosophy, the book of nature is written in characters which are alien to our alphabet. These characters are the triangle, squares, circles, pyramids, cones and other geometrical figures. I feel Galilean thought alive in my long-standing conviction that the sentiments and images awakened by the visible world, which is a formal world, are expressible only with great difficulty, or perhaps inexpressible with words […] inasmuch as they are indeed determined by forms, colours, space and light’ (quoted in Giorgio Morandi. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013, p. 23).

This connection with the visible world, and his commitment to finding a formal language with which to express it, was the central tenet of Morandi’s work and occupied him throughout his life. Paesaggio, which shows a virtuosic combination of pure volumetric forms, rich colour and luminosity, is a remarkable example of this unique artistic vision.