The Offer (1913)

Monogram on base

Exhibitions: Rome, I Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Secessione, 1913; Genoa, Società promotrice di Belle Arti, 1919.

Provenance : Buenos Aires, private collection

Bibliography: Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della ‘Secessione’, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, March – June 1913), p. 25, n. 26, table 39; A. Colasanti, Le Esposizioni di Belle Arti a Roma. La mostra della Società Amatori e Cultori – La Secessione, in ‘Emporium’, XXXVII, 222, 1913, p. 427; Società di Belle Arti in Genova -Catalogo delle opere d’arte (Genova, April – May, 1919), p. 23, n. 155; V. Pica, Mostra Collettiva di G. e A. CAROZZI – A. BOCCHI – N. D’ANTINO, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Galleria Pesaro, May 1921), Milan 1921, p. 15, n. 208 (with the title Fanciulla con coppa); R. Bossaglia, M. Quesada, Spadini, Roman Secession 1913-1916, Rome, Palombi Editori, 1986, p. 130, n. 57.

‘An elegant magnificator of the female nude ‘¹ was described as Nicola D’Antino by Vittorio Pica on the occasion of the exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in 1921. A few years earlier, at the height of Art Nouveau fervour, he participated in the First Exhibition of the Roman Secession in 1913, with three sculptures: the portrait of the boy Manfredo and the female statuettes Il grappolo and L’offerta. A refined interpreter of the female nude through a stylisation that exalts the sinuous, slender lines and elaborate movements and dance steps, the sculptor from Abruzzo was one of the major interpreters of the Art Nouveau aesthetic of the 1910s and one of the main protagonists of the Roman Secessionist season.

In the 1913 article in ‘Emporium’ dedicated to the Secession, Arduino Colasanti described D’Antino’s offering – illustrated on the previous page – as a ‘constant desire to render the slenderness, the fragility, the slightly perturbing charm of pure nudity ’²: the helmet á la garçon and the thin, adolescent body are constant references to Jugendstil aesthetics and Klimt’s linearism, in a vital correspondence between nature, the purity of naked bodies and the freedom of expression of youth, embodied in the supple movements and the primordial, ritualistic gesture of the offering.

A femmes fatale that becomes an ancestral and mysterious divinity, perfectly calibrated between fluid movements and the rhythms of volumes and surfaces, as can be seen in the rest of the production that anticipates the First World War and continues at least until the early 1920s, when the sculptor begins to give greater plastic evidence to the figures. An aesthetic dimension of D’Annunzio, on the borderline between reality and symbol, in which the female nude takes on the allegorical meaning of an ephemeral, metamorphic and seductive beauty, of an elusive vanitas, which conquers the bourgeois taste of the time. The maiden in theOffering is a delicate silhouette, a timeless little idol, that surpasses the ‘seriousness’ of 19th century sculptural verism and conquers a graceful linearism in a symbolic key.

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

Elena Lago