Casimiro Jodi

Casimiro Jodi was born in Modena in 1886. He trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Modena from 1904 to 1910, under the guidance of Achille Boschi and Gaetano Bellei. After winning the Poletti prize in 1908 with the essay Guido Mazzoni modelling one of his masterpieces, he moved to Rome for further training.

Attending Giulio Aristide Sartorio’s courses at the Accademia di San Luca, he also assisted him in the preparation of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy. During his years in Rome, he developed a rapid and luminous language that he used above all for compositions of historical reconstruction or genre, which constitute his essays as a pensioner.

After spending the last year of his studies in Florence, he took part in the competition to become a teacher of drawing: he first entered the Scuola normale maschile in Modena and then changed many schools, high schools and institutes during the 1920s and 1930s, in fact, combining his painting activity with that of teacher and headmaster.

The transition to a loose and lively chromaticism: from still life to portraits and landscapes

During the years of the First World War, as a stage commander on the railway line from Verona to Lake Garda, he came into contact with the artistic environment of Veneto, in particular with the Secessionist movements of Ca’ Pesaro. Having met Felice Casorati and Nino Barbantini, he moved further and further away from the academic language and into a chromatically loose painting style, made up of vibrant and rich touches of colour, with which he achieved significant success at national exhibitions. Moving with innate skill from landscapes to still lifes, interiors and genre scenes, Casimiro Jodi also excelled in portraiture, which he conducted with rare sensitivity in the introspective rendering of characters, as can be seen in Portrait of a Lady in the Mirror, 1913.

He was at the Venice Biennial in 1910 with Old Thief and Impression, in 1926 with A Snowfall in Modena, in 1928 with Lombardy Town and in 1930 with Poetaccio of Asola, Autumn in Lombardy Gardens and The Blessing of Seeds in the Hamlet. These works reveal Jodi’s constant interest in narrating the rural everyday life of the areas he moved to over the years to work as a teacher, from Modena to Asola in Lombardy.

He also took part in the Quadrennial Exhibitions in Rome: in 1931 he presented Entrance to Vignola, and in 1939 Quiet in the old district. The painter was also present at the Triennial exhibitions in Modena and at the Sindacali in Turin, and therefore had a rich exhibition activity, accompanied by personal exhibitions in which not only his paintings were shown, but also his considerable graphic production, which came about thanks to his various collaborations as an illustrator for the newspapers “Il duca Borso”, “La Secchia”, “Il marchese Colombi” and “Il gatto bigio”, a magazine he founded together with Mario Vellani Marchi. Active until the 1940s, he died in Rovigo in 1948.

Elena Lago