Ancient Vestal

signed top right: “V. Corcos”.

Note: the work is a preparatory study for the large 1900 painting Vestale, kept in a private collection in Florence

A Maestro of the à la mode portrait, painter with an impeccable technique and a dreamy touch, appreciated throughout Europe, Vittorio Matteo Corcos reached the pinnacle of the international artistic achievement by adopting an original, vivid, cosmopolitan style.

Born in Livorno in 1859, he trains at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and with Domenico Morelli in Naples. He moves to Paris in 1880 to perfect his skills in Léon Bonnat’s atelier. He effortlessly fits into the city’s cultural milieu and meets artists and literary figures such as Goncourt, Zola and Flaubert. He frequents the most in vogue social salons and begins working as an illustrator of fans and musical scores. He is introduced, along with Giuseppe De Nittis and Giovanni Boldini, to art dealer Adolphe Goupil, with whom he signs a fifteen-year contract, until 1896, therefore beyond his return to Italy in 1886. He interprets a light and charming painting style, with a virtuoso and seductive character, which reaches its peak of expression in the accomplishment of worldly portraits, especially of female characters, in which the elegance of the stroke is combined with a perceptive promptness of observation.

De Blowitz, the Paris correspondent for the London newspaper “The Times”, defines Corcos as the “Peintre des jolies femmes”, highlighting the delicate fullness of the dresses, the whiteness of the skin, the refinement of the composition and poses. “In portraying the living and speaking features, the mobile and changing expression of the human face: rendering that singular character that only a strong and brilliant artist knows how to capture from the lines of the face and transfuse it with colours onto the canvas (which places the painter’s work far above photography, which can only give us the mere appearance of a moment, most often fictitious and exaggerated), Vittorio Corcos, in the portrait, has very few rivals”[1].

After his years in Paris and the frequent exhibitions at the Salons, he returns to Florence where he marries Emma Ciabatti, who was very skilled at bringing to life the living room in their home in Via Marsilio Ficino. Loved by writers, painters and collectors, also highly sought after by the aristocracy and upper middle class throughout Europe, he makes portraitures his main activity. Iconic in his production are the fin de siècle female portraits, in which dreamy and beautiful models represent a languid and fascinating decadence, halfway between purity and seduction. The most famous paintings are those at the height of his success, at the beginning of the new century, in which the eternal feminine emerges in its most intelligible, serene essence, changeable and unchanged at the same time.

La Vestale (The Vestal) is from 1900. A vertical canvas preserved in a Florentine private collection, in which a priestess of Vesta, goddess of the domestic hearth and its flame, emerges from the dark background, seated in front of the sacred fire with some roses scattered in her lap, a symbol of illusive beauty, as light as the smoke from the brazier and as the veil covering her shoulders. The elegantly modelled forms are in harmony with the masterful rendering of the fabrics, flesh, hair, and the evocation of an idyllic classicism to be traced back to neo-Pompeian and aesthetic suggestions of the Pre-Raphaelites and painters like Leighton. This canvas, which depicts only three-quarters of the bust, is clearly a preparatory study for the creation of the Vestale: compared to his final work, which follows the entire body of the maiden, this profile shows a more personal, dreamy dimension, as can be clearly seen from the open eyes lost in mystical thought. The bust is here enveloped in vapours and undefined fumes, from which emerges the peplos pinned at the shoulder as done in the final work itself. The distinctness of the face, with its pearly, rosy complexion comes from the light that contrasts with the darkness of the background and that highlights the elegantly disorderly hair, embellished with a laurel wreath and red berries that are not present in the final version. Graceful features and fine lines, soft shapes and ethereal colour sublimated into an image of ancient timeless beauty.

[1] G. Branca, Vittorio Corcos, «La vita italiana», II, 1895, p. 334.

Elena Largo

Bibliography:

Vittorio Corcos. Il fantasma e il fiore, Exhibition Catalogue by Sisi (Livorno, Civic Museum, June 26^th – September 7^th, 1997), Florence, Edifir, 1997.

Farinella, Vittorio Cocos pittore alla moda in “Nuoci Studi livornesi”, VI, 1998, pp. 83-120.

Corcos. I sogni della Belle Époque, Exhibition Catalogue by I. Taddei, F. Mazzocca, C. Sisi (Padua, Palazzo Zabarella, September 6^th – December 14^th, 2014), Venice, Marsilio, 2014.