Grape Harvest (1938)

Signed and dated lower left: ‘G. Sciltian 38’.

On the back: scroll of Galleria Gian Ferrari, 1938

Exhibitions: Milan, Solo exhibition, Galleria Gian Ferrari, 1938; Florence, Exhibition of the painter Gregorio Sciltian, Lyceum, 1940;

Bibliography: Gregorio Sciltian. Opera omnia, edited by R. Civello, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, 1986, no. 26.

1938, a magical year in Gregorio Sciltian’s production, also included the execution of the painting Vendemmia, conceived only two years after the beginning of his rise at the Venice Biennale in 1936, a crucial moment in which the painter had begun to attract the interest of an attentive and cultured niche collector. The crowning glory of these last and intense years of the 1930s was the prestigious solo exhibition at the Galleria Gian Ferrari in Milan, where the painting under examination also appeared. Defined by Ugo Ojetti, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Biennale in 1942, as a ‘limpid, solid, arch-finished painter, with an evident plasticity and a careful relief that makes one think of a 15th-century panel, between Mantegna, Bellini and Carlo Crivelli ’1, Sciltian had already enjoyed the precious favour of Roberto Longhi, who, back in 1926, presented him in the catalogue of his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Bragaglia in Rome, still very young and unripe, extolling his ‘palpable veracity “2 that brings him close to Caravaggio and the young Velásquez, skilfully transported into modernity through a ”rapid, energetic rewiring of life in painting’.

Longhi perceives in Sciltian a compositional fantasy, a mimicry of the real, a chiaroscuro and a technical skill derived from the sources
Italian and Spanish seventeenth-century sources, but also a present-day communicative flicker, precisely discernible in the Vendemmia, in which a laughing, adolescent Bacchus, in the guise of a humble peasant looking at Ceruti’s characters, observes us with the typical winking gaze of Sciltian self-portraits – this is in fact probably his self-portrait as a young man. He offers a bunch of grapes, a direct reminder of the grapes held by Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus. The draperies, especially that of the white camisole that leaves one shoulder uncovered, are further quotations from Caravaggio, indicative of a naturalistic but cultured painting, in which plant elements and a Renaissance background accompany the bread, the bundle and the demijohn of wine on the ground. Symbols of a world in which everyday life and allegory
of autumn come together in a combination of solid atmospheric evidence, limpid chromatic mixtures and chiaroscuro plays, representing the acme of Gregorio Sciltian’s most successful stylistic phase, that of ‘plasticity par excellence ’4 as his friend De Chirico defined him. A ‘Caravaggesque’ painting enveloped, however, by a fairytale-like hint of metaphysical immobility in which the real merges with the oneiric, perfectly in line with the future programme of the Modern Painters of Reality whose manifesto Sciltian would sign in 1947.
The meditation on the Dionysian theme in a modern key had already been the subject of the works Bacchus (1932), still baroque, and Bacchus in the tavern, a masterpiece presented at the 1936 Venice Biennial and today conserved at the National Gallery in Rome. An unusual painting,
complex, in which a discreet Bacchus enters a tavern, opening a curtain as if in a theatrical scene and, having removed the veil between reality and fiction, between truth and dream, is greeted by an audience illuminated by grazing light, reminiscent of Caravaggio’s Vocation of St. Matthew: the 20th century is once again nourished by ancient suggestions and the realism of the solid, rounded forms of a hermetic dimension that also emerges from Vendemmia. A valuable painting, therefore, not only because it has recently reappeared on the market, but because it constitutes a
further addition to Sciltian Bacchic compositions. It was painted following his move to Milan in 1937, during the period of greatest success with the public and critics, as the artist himself recounts: ‘Through De Chirico I managed to get to know the cream of the Milanese intelligentsia. By now I had many works in the studio and I decided to set up a large exhibition […]. With the help of Baruffaldi and Verdirame I opened an exhibition at the Gian Ferrari gallery in Via Clerici, with the presentation of Raffaele Carrieri ‘5 . A painting that preserves Sciltian’s identity as a twentieth-century ‘old master’, who knew how to combine the optical coldness of the German Neue Sachlichkeit, learnt during his youthful trip to Germany, with the transparent delicacy of Magic Realism, harmonised and summarised in the chromatic softness of the seventeenth century, filtered through Roberto Longhi’s critical contribution.

1 U. Ojetti, Nature morte e nature vive, ‘Corriere della Sera’, 25 February 1942
2 R. Longhi, Preface to the Personal Exhibition of Gregorio Sciltian, Galleria d’Arte Bragaglia (Rome, March 1926), in Gregorio Sciltian. Opera omnia, edited by Renato Civello, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, p. 41.
3 Ibid, p. 42.
4 G. De Chirico, Uno scritto di De Chirico su Sciltian, ‘Stile’, I, 1941, in Gregorio Sciltian. Opera omnia, edited by Renato Civello, Editore Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, p. 45.
5 G. Sciltian, My Adventure, Rizzoli, Milan 1963, p. 438.