Carlo Socrate

Carlo Socrates quotations

Carlo Socrates’ works from the 1920s and 1930s have average quotations between 3,500 euros and 8,000 euros depending on subject and quality. Particularly interesting subjects can also reach higher figures. Later works are around 2,000 euros.

The suggested quotations are only indicative. They depend in fact on many factors such as size, subject, technique, and year. We recommend that you send us a photo of your work by Charles Socrates for a free and accurate evaluation.

Biography

Carlo Socrates was born in 1889 in Mezzana Bigli, a town in Lombardy, but spent his childhood in Argentina when he moved there with his actor parents. He returned to Italy in 1909 following the receipt of a scholarship and went to Florence where he studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo. He has Giovanni Costetti as his teacher, who introduces him to literary circles where he meets Armando Spadini, Felice Carena and Ercole Drei. With the latter he formed a sincere friendship and it was he who hosted him in his Roman home in 1914.

Beginnings under the spell of Cézanne and Spadini

After this stay, the artist decided to settle in the capital and worked in a studio near Villa Torlonia. He began frequenting the third room of the Caffè Aragno during the years of the Roman Secession and was greatly fascinated by Cézanne’s formal and spatial research, visible in the works he exhibited at the Fourth Roman Secession in 1916 Man Reading, Drawing, Interior and Garden. The artist left as a volunteer for the Great War with the Lancieri di Firenze, but continued to experiment and approached the language of Armando Spadini. In 1917 he worked as a set designer for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet Company, collaborating on the sets for Las Meninas performed at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.

Meeting Picasso and the Spanish Seventeenth Century.

During this period he met Pablo Picasso and collaborated with him on the sets for Parade. He then follows him to Paris where he meets André Derain and enters the French cultural milieu. The relationship with Picasso is very strong and also accompanies him to Barcelona and Madrid, at a stage when the Spanish painter is embarking on a classicist quest. These trips will be relevant in Charles Socrates’ investigation, which will embrace French Impressionism as well as Spanish 16th- and 17th-century art.

Classicist turn in the climate of the Return to Order.

In 1918 he returned to Rome and obtained a studio at Villa Strohl-Fern. In the same year he participates in the Casina Valadier Exhibition at the Pincio, exhibiting Bambino che dorme, a work with still Spadinian features, alongside Natura morta con piatto di mele e cipolle, a work that bears witness to this new classical taste. In fact, the painter increasingly approached a personal classicism by entering the climate of the Return to Order and approaching “Plastic Values.” His resumption of past stylistic features, transits in particular through the seventeenth century, demonstrating an attention to the real datum and a pure enlightenment, inserting his characters in suspended and dreamy atmospheres. Indeed, in 1922 he took part in the Florentine Spring Exhibition with classical works such as Sleeping Venus, Country, Susanna and Still Life.

In 1924 he presented at the Milan Exposition Female Torso that continued to adhere to the research of the Return to Order, as well as the works exhibited at the solo exhibition organized within the First Fascist Trade Union of Lazio in 1929 that counted fifteen canvases including Piazza di Trevi, Woman Dressing, Bridge on the Tiber, Flowers, Still Life and Danae. Another important solo exhibition was set up for the First Rome Quadrennial in 1931 with thirty-four works among which we can mention The Virgin, Venice, Castel Sant’Angelo, The Turkey, Woman with Child, Fruit Bearer, St. Peter at Dawn, Villa Borghese and Head of a Woman.

In 1935 he returned to the second edition of the Quadriennale with seven works La sfogliatura, Piccoli calciatori, Dormente, Il piccolo pescatore, Il cappello di paglia, Il vestito della sposa and La ricamatrice.

In his works there is a traditional pattern, a constructive solidity and precision of sign that he learned from the old masters of the Renaissance or the 17th century, but also Ingres or Courbet.

The artist died in Rome in 1967.

Emanuela Di Vivona