Landscape (1932)

Signed and dated lower right: ‘Antonio Donghi 32’;

on the reverse, exhibition label from the Frati di Camaiore; inscription with signature authenticated by Vittorio Grotti

Provenance: Carlo Tridenti collection; Milan, private collection

Exhibitions: Camaiore, Mostra d’Arte Moderna ‘Ai Frati’, 1969, no. 42

Antonio Donghi, the leading exponent of Magic Realism in the 1920s and 1930s, was the creator of a specific lexicon in which art is understood as mimesis of reality and a ‘return to craft’, but constantly permeated by existential anxieties linked to the historical context.

With strong references to the balanced solemnity of 15th-century painting, combined with metaphysical, suspended and disturbing atmospheres, Donghi starts from a clear and lenticular reality that he sublimates into magic. His iconography is often vernacular, intimate and domestic, but there is a sense of suspension of reality that creeps into the clear, immobile and enigmatic images, pervaded by a magical sense of mystery. ‘Realistic precision of contours, solidity of matter firmly grounded on the ground; and around it, like an atmosphere of magic that makes one feel, through an intense uneasiness, almost another dimension in which our life is projected…’ 1 . This is what we see in Donghi’s immobile and clear settings, populated by incisive volumes with inviolate contours, inspired by the fifteenth century. A fixity that is at times ironic, at times melancholic, which in its simplicity totally devoid of rhetoric, is found not only in his large figurative works, but also and above all in his silent landscapes, such as this one from 1932, exhibited many years later, in 1969, at the ‘Ai Frati’ Modern Art Exhibition in Camaiore. A few buildings in a rarefied town in central Italy, perhaps Tuscany – in the early 1930s, Donghi produced a series of landscapes and urban views of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio – rolling hills in the background, streets and windows devoid of human presence, solid, pure volumes, an impalpable brushstroke like the light that makes everything homogeneous, immobile and alienating. This was a metaphysical placidity that Donghi had already achieved in the first half of the 1920s in his taciturn views of Rome, such as Ponte Cestio and Via del Lavatore (fig. 1), which depict a slow and almost intangible everyday reality, where matter seems to sublimate into an abstract dimension of enigmatic splendour. These perceptions were reinforced in the 1930s, when Donghi reached the height of his success, with the Venice Biennale, the International Exhibition of Paintings in Pittsburgh, the Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings in Baltimore, the Rome Quadriennale and solo exhibitions. It was on the occasion of the exhibition at the Galleria di Dario Sabatello in Via del Babuino in 1932 that Trombadori praised his painting, now at the height of its stylistic maturity, made up of evocative references, ‘from surfaces where details are set in place to the most subtle chromatic preciousness’. And it was precisely in Paesaggio (Landscape) in 1932 that Donghi became the interpreter of a balanced and serene tonalism born from meditation on the landscape of Piero della Francesca (fig. 2), where each volume fits perfectly with the others and the surrounding space, and the geometric shapes of the building facades, without figures, lend a silent solemnity to the entire representation.

A landscape that becomes an emblematic representation of a ‘plastic calm’, of an impalpable painting that purifies it of all everyday accidentality to transform it into an absolute, timeless, magical reality.

Elena Lago

1 M. Bontempelli, Realismo magico e altri scritti sull’arte, edited by E. Pontiggia, Milan, Abscondita, 2006, p. 72.

2 F. Trombadori, Antonio Donghi, catalogue of the solo exhibition, Rome, Galleria Sabatello, 1932.

3 Antonio Donghi. La magia del silenzio, catalogue of the exhibition edited by F. Benzi (Rome, Palazzo Merulana, February 2024), Modena, Diano Libri 2024, p. 27.