The spring (1935)

Signed lower right: ‘Cagnaccio di San Pietro 1935’.

Provenance: Rome, private collection

Bibliography: unpublished

La fonte, a pencil on paper executed by Cagnaccio di San Pietro in 1935, is the preparatory model for the slightly smaller oil on masonite of the same name kept in a private collection in Milan. Belonging to the mature phase of the artist’s production, it nonetheless retains the same ‘sincere yet minute, analytical objectivism […] with an almost ruthless quest to get there with the most rigorous definition of every detail ’¹ that emerged from the youthful works of the 1920s. The shining sharpness of the details, the studied composure of the sign and the chiaroscuro are perfectly suited to the choice of subject: a nude of a woman seated on the ground, with her legs gathered to the side and her hands brought up to her face to drink the water from the spring. A variation on the theme of the bather, in which a modern goddess or nymph is about to drink, in an Arcadian and dreamy atmosphere in which, however, everything becomes vivid and present through the actualisation of the woman’s algid body and her hairstyle: no longer soft locks spreading over her bust, but an austere gathering behind the nape of her neck. The dream envisioned by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, that of theaurea prima aetas returns in the topos of the bather, symbol of an Apollonian and at the same time Dionysian classicism, which in Cagnaccio di San Pietro is synthesised in a Magic Realism in which everything remains suspended but also charged with melancholy. The motif is clearly that of the rediscovery of Mediterranean and mythological sources, a meditation, therefore, on ancient and Renaissance art, but with a renewed full and limpid formalism, in which the nymph or naiad is transformed into a middle-class woman and the mythical aura becomes a true mythology of everyday life. Starting from the drawing, Cagnaccio fixes the pivotal points of the composition, which in the final result is turgid, pure, impeccably analytical, without betraying his usual language. If the pure complexion emerges from the painting, the very pure contours stand out in the preparatory study, which derive as much from the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) bather models as from the same ‘aigre’ subjects more recently executed by Félix Vallotton (1865- 1925), including the Piccola bagnante seduta sulla sabbia, of 1911, which shares the same recollected pose of the woman with the work under examination. In a vivid reference to the courtly Latinity of the themes, the need for an anti-impressionist drawing precision persists, guided by a strong compositional linearity and a return to order, pervaded by a fairy-like atmospheric suspension and an intimate verism of great modernity. No longer that crude and blunt realism that transpires from the painting After the Orgy of 1928, where the female nudes appear voluptuous, angular and perturbing, but a more dreamy and magical dimension, so to speak light and elusive, albeit in the absolute clarity of form, which characterises the author’s maturity and which reveals as much a study of the antique as attention to the thin layer that lies between the real and the symbol. Water, in the purity of the primeval source, becomes an allegory of birth and fertility personified by woman.

¹ U. Nebbia, The fourteenth Venice Biennale I. Pittori italiani, ‘Emporium’, LIX, 1924, 353, pp. 291-292.

Elena Lago