The visit to Villa Giulia and the discovery of a magical world in 1928 changed his painting. An exhibition in Venice closely compares archeological pieces from Etruria with the artist’s works.
The Gypsies, 1928, by Massimo Campigli and an Etruscan sarcophagus in Palazzo Franchetti, Venice - ph: Francesco Allegretto
It is a wish fulfilled after many years, the exhibition that Palazzo Franchetti in Venice dedicates to “Massimo Campigli and the Etruscans”. It was the artist himself who had imagined placing his paintings alongside archeological artifacts. Campigli described his 1928 visit to the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia as an epiphany (he called it a “coup de foudre”) that would forever change his painting: “I loved this small, smiling humanity that makes one smile in return. I found enviable the blessed sleep upon the sarcophagi of those other terracotta odalisques and their way of being dead. A pagan happiness entered my paintings, both in the spirit of the subjects and in the spirit of the work itself, which became freer and more lyrical”. Elegantly installed in the damask-lined rooms overlooking the Grand Canal, the exhibition sets side by side, on a thematic and typological basis, thirty-five works by Campigli dated between 1928 and 1966 and around fifty objects including small bronzes, vases, furnishings, and large sarcophagi. These are precious archaeological materials made available by the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria, many of them never previously exhibited because they were kept in storage by the Alto Lazio or recovered by the police - protection of cultural heritage. A multi-layered display (the archeological finds, many of exceptional quality, form an exhibition within the exhibition) that does more than merely place modern or contemporary pieces “in dialogue” with ancient ones through hanging strategies or by seeking more or less latent connections. Instead, it constructs a philological path of derivation and formal reworking.
The selection of Etruscan artifacts was made by officials of the Viterbo Superintendency according to Campigli’s selective gaze: terracotta faces, which inspired a stylized portrait type; bronzes and ceramic vases decorated with human and animal figures that the artist adopted and transformed in his own works; buccheri with geometric and curved forms upon which Campigli modeled his “vase-women”; and finally jewelry, omnipresent and a true passion, bordering on fetishism, of the artist.
For Italian artists of the first half of the twentieth century, the Etruscans represented a stimulating point of reference. There is something unsettling in the visual heritage offered by the Etruscans, or perhaps simply in the very idea of the Etruscans: mysterious people, with a language believed to be undecipherable, whose afterlife was imagined as an endless banquet that, in return, veils life with a funerary aura; a glorious yet not triumphant people who disappeared, submerged by victorious Romanity. The Etruscan imagination is elegant yet rustic, sophisticated yet powerful. It is a different kind of classicism (rather than anti-classical) compared to the established reading of the Greco-Roman tradition, perceived as something original, ancestral, primitively Italic, not yet corrupted by Aegean breezes. Evidently, it does not matter whether the Etruscan world was truly so, but rather that it was perceived in this way. Narrative triumphs over reality. In the exhibition catalogue (Silvana), Superintendent Margherita Eichberg recalls how Massimo Pallottino, the father of modern Etruscology, spoke of an ‘Etruscan novel’: «True identification with Etruscan art, “indigenous, genuine, original”, is recent, entirely twentieth-century: sculptors such as Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Francesco Messina, Libero Andreotti, and painters such as Carlo Carrà and Scipione were enchanted by it» and later Manzù and Greco, Giacometti and Moore, Leoncillo, even Schifano.
What version of this “Etruscan novel” does Campigli offer? As the curator Martina Corgnati writes, for the artist the Etruscans “are not sources to be quoted but forms to be dreamed.” Yet Campigli’s dream also changes over time. While always maintaining a metaphysical aura, he gradually dissolves the sensual and Mediterranean (or perhaps agrarian-Roman) mystery of The Gypsies, the masterpiece of an entire career, into a more detached and subtly ironic climate. He delights in interpreting, in the serious and archaic meter of mural painting, elegant ladies in high society or strolling along the beach, eventually breaking them apart and fixing them, women-vases or vases-women, into two-dimensional geometric games approaching abstraction.
Just as other archaic sources, from Crete to Fayyum, would overlap with the Etruscans, so too would visual fragments of contemporaneity: a fusion of time and archetype, the hallmark through which Campigli interprets the world.