Woman from Terracina

Signed and dated lower right: “Edoardo Del Neri Roma”

“Versatile genius in the arts”[1] , Edoardo Del Neri, an artist from Gorizia who trained in Vienna during the Secessionist period, was a painter, engraver, illustrator and decorator. His career, which unfolded precisely between the two movements of Secession and the return to the Novecento style of the 1920s, was varied and rich in influences from both the Northern European artistic climate and the primitive rural realities of Italy and Libya, whose ethnographic, mythical, historical and, above all, human  aspects he was able to evoke and document.
The study of faces and bodies, anatomical features, and the investigation of types and attitudes have been part of Del Neri’s research since his academic training in Vienna. Between the expressive idealism of Jugendstil and German and French naturalism, the artist specialised in accentuating individuality through sharp lines and a symbolist undertone that he continued throughout the 1910s. His portraiture is guided by truth and vision, aspects that he knows how to combine especially when he ventures into the popular dimension where he finds models of simple, ancestral, hard life, but supported by solid values translated into the incisiveness of graphic dreams. The portraits of the fishermen of Grado and the farmers of Gorizia are treated with rare sensitivity, as are those executed after his move to Rome in 1914: the small villages of the Roman countryside and, more generally, of central Italy (from Lazio to Abruzzo to Molise) became the favourite subjects of his pictorial research, which, while maintaining the raw graphic style reminiscent of the Secessionist movement, was enriched with explosive colours, as can be clearly seen in Woman from Terracina, a painting executed in the early 1920s. The linear and compact figure of the elderly woman, rendered with pure realism, has its origins in the engraving of the same name exhibited at the Mostra degli Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti in Rome in 1922 and now preserved in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, with which it shares the same serious, wrinkled face and the shawl that protects her head and shoulders. While in the engraving the shawl derives its expressive power from the black and white, in the oil on canvas it is brought to life by the chromatic charge that evokes the tones of German expressionism, just as the engraving is clearly derived from Die Brücke. In the background of the woodcut, the houses of Terracina, a coastal town near the Circeo promontory, can be seen as harsh graphic elements, while in the painting, under a clear sky, the “Lestre”, typical rural dwellings made of woven reeds, stand out. These were the homes of the farmers and shepherds of the Agro Pontino (Pontine Marshes) before the land reclamation carried out by the Fascist regime between 1929 and 1941. These almost primitive buildings reappear in several of Del Neri’s works created during his years of exploration of this territory, particularly in the painting Woman of the Pontine Marshes, which depicts the same elderly model as in the painting presented here.

The study of the woman’s anatomy reveals an atavistic but stoic endurance of the difficulties that have always afflicted rural populations in the Pontine Marshes, just as the chromatic rendering of the costume is symbolic of an ancient, bold folk tradition, fully expressed in the words dedicated to Del Neri by the writer Biagio Marin in 1916: “The sun-drenched, primitive Roman countryside gradually invades the white walls of the painter’s studio, with its green horizons, its solemn oxen, its suffering humanity of shepherds, cowboys and peasants, all fused into a unity of the same land, the same light”[2]. Humanity is thus narrated through the simplification of forms and attention to details of costumes or glances, as the painter will continue to do shortly thereafter, even while changing geographical coordinates. Called upon in 1925 by Count Volpi di Misurata to illustrate the volume The Rebirth of Tripolitania, he produced a series of engravings, drawings and paintings dedicated to the women and men of Libya, similar to those of the Lazio countryside. These representations are distinguished by the same intensity and ethnographic attention that Del Neri applied to the women of the Pontine Marshes as well as those portrayed in the mosques or bazaars of Tripoli. The same plastic and colouristic evidence, the same nervous stroke, the same reality expressed through a synthetic and modern vision of society, especially female society, represented in its most granitic, uncorrupted and proud essence . This aspect is particularly evident in the apex of his engraving production, the famous etching of the Witch from Saracinesco, the elderly and archaic “healer” of the village, who shares with the Woman from Terracina the same firm and immovable solemnity that makes her resemble an ancestral deity. Enveloped in an aura of sacredness and mystery, these female figures are true guardian deities of the traditions and popular roots from which Del Neri constantly draws inspiration. This solemnity, evident in the posture, rigid frontality, expression and imperturbability of the subjects portrayed in, is not only a formal starting point, but becomes the vehicle through which the artist restores dignity and evocative power to the female tradition.

[1] I. Scaturro, Artisti contemporanei: Edoardo Del Neri, “Emporium”, XLVII, 278, 1918, p. 66

[2] B. Marin, Mostra Antologica del pittore Edoardo Del Neri 1890–1932, exhibition catalogue edited by G. Bradaschia and M. Malni Pascoletti, Gorizia 1977, pp. 106–107.

Elena Lago