The Friends (1926)

Signed on the base: ‘D’Antino’.

provenance: Rome, private collection
exhibition: XV Venice Biennale, 1926

bibliography: XV International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice, 1926, n. 42 (silver specimen); M.G. Tolomeo, Speranza, Nicola D’Antino, pp. 159 – 161, no. 133 (bronze specimen reproduced).

‘An elegant magnificator of the female nude”[1] was described as Nicola D’Antino by Vittorio Pica on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in 1921. A few years later, at the Venice Biennale in 1926, he was to present the silver sculpture Le amiche, two seductive female nudes approaching each other with a cup in their hands, in a game of glances and calibrated movements. The indication by M. G. Tolomeo Speranza[2], who identified the bronze example as the one exhibited at the Venice Biennale, is therefore inaccurate. In the catalogue, on page 93, no. 42, the entry ‘Le amiche – argento’ confirms that the exemplar exhibited at the Biennale was the silver one, which must in all probability be identified in the one presented here.

The á la garçon helmets and the slender bodies are still reminiscent of Jugendstil poses, but the sensations of Klimt’s linearism now disappear and soften into elegantly synthetic curves and pure, essential Art Deco volumetries that also leave room for the study of classical statuary, as can be seen in the chiastic progression of the maidens’ limbs, no longer just slender presences.

Refined statuettes of femmes fatales or ancestral divinities that seem to preserve an ancient ritual narrative declined in a modern key, as if the two women were the protagonists of a mysterious and intimate theatrical scene. Classicism, archaic suggestions, fluid and rhythmic movements come together in a sculpture that is fully influenced by the international cultural climate of the early 1920s and is transformed into a small and precious object in which D’Antino’s quality as a ‘refined evoker of exquisite feminine elegance […] with that constant desire to render the slenderness, the fragility, the slightly perturbing charm of pure nudity’[3] is clearly visible.

3] An aesthetic dimension that is both D’Annunzio and Sperellian, on the borderline between nature and symbol, in which the female nude takes on the allegorical meaning of an ephemeral, metamorphic and pungent beauty, of an elusive vanitas, which conquers the bourgeois taste of the time and which also seems to have affinities with Felice Casorati’s contemporary female figures, such as the Portrait of Cynthia Maugham of 1925, a ‘supple and curved’ woman with the same 1920s-style helmet. These delicate, light silver silhouettes mutely reflect the light and like small, timeless idols stand out between hieraticity and sensuality. Two dancers or two actresses locked harmoniously and lyrically in a gesture of mutual offering, in the yearning for nectar contained in cups.

The friends take on even more value if one considers that they are among the last sculptures still linked to this aestheticising and decorative climate, since in the mid-1920s a return to order was already prevailing, to which D’Antino too would soon convert, through a statuary that was plastically fuller and made of solid volumes. Examples of this are the monumental figures executed in the early 1930s, including the statues for the Ponte Littorio in Pescara and the athletes for the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome.

[1] V. Pica, Mostra Collettiva di G. e A. CAROZZI – A. BOCCHI – N. D’ANTINO, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Galleria Pesaro, May 1921), Milan 1921.

[2] M.G. Tolomeo Speranza, Nicola D’Antino, Rome, De Luca Editori d’Arte, 1987, pp. 159 – 161, n. 133 (reproduced bronze copy).

[3] A. Colasanti, Le Esposizioni di Belle Arti a Roma, ‘Emporium’, XXXVII, 222, 1913, pp. 428-429.