Calabrian peasant (1929)

Signed and dated lower left “Carlo Bocca 1929”; on the back label of the XVII International Art Exhibition of Venice in 1930

Exhibitions: 17th Venice Biennale, 1930

Literature: La XVII Biennale di Venezia 1930, exhibition catalogue, p. 65, n. 4.

Contadina calabrese (Calabrian peasant woman), oil on panel presented by Carlo Bocca at the 1930 Venice Biennale, represents the pinnacle of the Lombard artist’s pictorial production. If in the years immediately following his training at the Brera Academy and his apprenticeship with Alciati, Bocca had favoured an evocative post-Impressionism with a hazy atmosphere and a dark palette, during the 1920s he clearly felt the influence of the return to order and Novecento styles.

The painter achieved full adherence to a solid, clear and balanced painting style at the beginning of the 1930s, with the iconic and incisive portrait of the Calabrian Peasant Woman. This work decreed his success with critics and the public because it contained that perfect formal equilibrium created by the three-dimensional value of colour and line perfectly combined to render the impassive face of the Calabrian woman in traditional dress. This hieratic stillness, reminiscent of the absoluteness of an ancient statue, emanates a mythical atmosphere of hermetic suspension that recalls the clear and silent atmospheres of Magical Realism.

Through a very fine, smooth and impeccable pictorial technique, where every detail finds its perfect place in the small universe of the canvas, Carlo Bocca shows clear affinities with the poetics and language of Cagnaccio di San Pietro, whose rural portraits and those of the men and women of Pellestrina hide a similar allegorical reference to the human condition. Bocca’s Contadina (Peasant Woman) shares with the elderly and humble commoners of the Venetian Lagoon the same chromatic and formal force, the same timeless suspension, the same moral and introspective depth.

A detail that stands out in the composition is the white head covering that frames the marked face of the peasant woman, the so-called Calabrian ritùartu in white linen, which through particular folds falls on the shoulders of the woman, giving her, together with the embroidered blouse and the high-waisted skirt, an elegance and an almost ritual sacredness. This portrait is therefore not only the best pictorial example of Bocca, but also the study and narration of a proud regionalism that was particularly in vogue at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. In those years many artists were interested in the diffusion of folklore customs and the typicality of the Italian regions in their ancient and primitive essence, partly supporting the narration of the Italic myth promoted by the regime. Only a few years later, the interior decoration of the E42 (now the Museum of Civilisation in Rome) was designed, with frescoes depicting scenes of traditional Italian life – including Wedding Ceremony in Sardinia by Nino Bertoletti, Funerals in Puglia by Emanuele Cavalli, The Tuna Slaughter by Pietro Barillà.

Bocca fits into this dimension, choosing a solid portrait enhanced by the contemporary setting, instead of the scene or paratactic narration, creating an image with perfect chromatic harmony, lenticular attention to detail, a refined way of interpreting reality, perhaps in a bare rural interior, which, however, leaves a veiled sense of mystery, enclosed in the focal point of the work, the dry face of the peasant woman who, with graceful reserve, joins her hands in her lap in a timeless gesture, like the peasant women of Cagnaccio di San Pietro.

Elena Lago