Peasant Woman from Abruzzo with a Sciaquajja (circa 1890)

Inscriptions: lower right, “Michetti”.

Provenance: Giuseppe Tudini Collection

An international artist in Paris during the 1870s, official painter of the Kingdom of Italy at the turn of the century, and a leading figure in the Francavilla Circle—which included such figures as Gabriele d’Annunzio, Francesco Paolo Tosti, Paolo De Cecco, and Costantino Barbella—Francesco Paolo Michetti (Tocco da Casauria 1851 – Francavilla al Mare 1929) is one of the major figures of Italian painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Having achieved success at the 1877 National Exhibition in Naples with The Corpus Christi Procession in Chieti (private collection)—a sweeping, exuberant work that drew the public into a festive and unexpected scene— and having consolidated his fame with the solemn figures arranged in the polycentric space of Il Voto, purchased at the 1883 International Exhibition in Rome by the National Gallery of Modern Art, the artist built, work by work, a narrative centered on Abruzzo, squeezed between land and sea, whose ancient and ancestral customs were disappearing under the pressure of modernity. The nature and people of his native land are the protagonists of a great cyclical and symbolic poem of life and death, joy and sorrow, of which each work constitutes a canto.

The previously unpublished work Paesana abruzzese con scaquajja is a striking example of Michetti’s output spanning the late 1880s and early 1890s, a period in which he explored the use of black and white, achieving results in painting that approached photography in an incessant linguistic exchange between the two media. Photographic portraits of Abruzzese villagers, taken in the studio against painted backdrops, constitute an extraordinary corpus to draw upon for an inexhaustible series of heads executed in tempera or pastel, most of which remain to be discovered or are documented exclusively through the photographic records created by the artist himself. The theme of the face constitutes one of the cornerstones of the great choral poem that Michetti unfolds over the decades through rural scenes and an anthropological study of popular customs and traditions. The features of the people of Abruzzo have been studied since the late 1870s in an endless series of works, the first of which were presented at the 1881 Milan Exposition.

The portrait, understood as a physiognomic and psychological study, is, therefore, one of the themes around which his entire body of work is organized. “By analyzing human physiognomy, the master sought, found, and knew how to extract the type […]. Some of those heads are marvels of psychological insight and craftsmanship” (G. d’Annunzio, Note on F. P. Michetti, “Il Convito,” 1896, 8, pp. 583–592, p. 589), d’Annunzio commented in 1896 in a seminal essay on the artist. It was, however, in the late 1880s that Michetti reached full maturity in portraiture from a technical and compositional standpoint, rendering features and hair with surprising vivacity and realism, harmoniously composed according to an ideal of eternal and ancestral beauty. Notable is his ability to convey, in black and white, the luminosity and brilliance of the jewelry worn by his models.

One of the earliest examples of this genre dates to around 1887 (Genoa, Raccolte Frugone, fig. 1), depicting a young woman with a frown, followed by the Self-Portrait (private collection, fig. 2) in black and white from 1888. Abruzzese Peasant Woman with Sciaquajja dates to the early 1890s, following these paintings and preceding the studies for Jorio’s Daughter created in 1893 (fig. 3) and several intense head studies that have recently appeared on the market and are included in the second volume of the artist’s general catalog (figs. 4–6). The woman, one of the many models who frequented the studio in Francavilla a Mare, is portrayed in profile and wears a white blouse, contrasted by the headscarf from which unruly curls escape. The ornaments are well-defined: a necklace rendered with a few strokes of black and white, and above all a sparkling sciacquajja, the typical Abruzzese earring that, thanks to its lightness, could be worn even in daily life and even while working in the fields. The typical crescent shape also gave the jewel a symbolic and apotropaic function. Although the sciaquajja may be made with slight variations, Michetti’s portraits always feature the same model with a nut-and-bolt clasp, perhaps belonging to the artist’s family (figs. 7–9).

It is likely that the presence of the sciaquajja, as well as the modernity of the photographic-style black and white, may have caught the attention of Cavalier Giuseppe Tudini (Arringo 1885–1961), a builder of Abruzzese origin, who between the 1920s and the postwar period helped construct entire Roman neighborhoods from Monte Sacro Alto to Talenti, as well as the Capannelle racetrack, and outside the capital, much of the city of Sabaudia. The entrepreneur’s collection included 20th-century artists such as the sculptors Nicola D’Antino and Arturo Dazzi. Although he dealt with seemingly traditional themes, Michetti—especially beginning in the 1990s—had, in fact, proven himself to be a modern painter on par with artists of a younger generation, both in his anthropological exploration that transcends mere rural folklore and in the intense dialogue between painting and photography that culminates in visions that transcend reality.

Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto