Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

The ‘Conventino’, as it was called, became the
meeting place of the artistic coterie of Francavilla, and
was frequented by Gabriele d’Annunzio (who had
been a close friend of Michetti’s since 1880 and wrote
many of his works there, including Il Piacere and
Trionfo della morte), the sculptor Costantino Barbella,
the composer Francesco Paolo Tosti, and a younger
sculptor, Nicola D’Antino.
1883 was also the year he painted Voto, which was
shown at the Esposizione di Belle Arti in Rome and
was much admired and immediately purchased,
together with a great number of preliminary drawings,
by the newly established Galleria Nazionale d’Arte
Moderna,.
In 1895 Michetti exhibited, at the Biennale of Venice,
La Figlia di Jorio, a large tempera painting, on which
he had been working for more than ten years, and for
which he had made countless studies: it was awarded
the first prize.
In 1900 he took part in the Exposition Universelle
in Paris with paintings titled Le serpi and Gli storpi.
In the first years of the twentieth century, Michetti’s
pictorial production underwent an extremely original
evolution: it became chiefly focused on landscapes,
seascapes, and black-and-white tempera paintings.
The latter depicted young women and bathers, and
were characterised by extremely modern brushstrokes
that were abstract, light, almost monochromatic: the
practice of photography, in which Michetti had been
interested for a long time, almost got the upper hand
over traditional painting. The last exhibition in which
Michetti took part was the Venice Biennale of 1910,
where he exhibited a series of tempera landscapes. In
1909 he became a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
He died of pneumonia at the Conventino on 5 March
1929.
This Head of a Boy belongs with a particularly fine,
small group of works made by the artist during a short
period, 1877 to 1880, although the oldest biographies
attribute earlier dates to some of them 1 . Sometimes
they were intended to be used as models for figures in
his most complex paintings, for example the Corpus
Domini of 1877 and the Primavera of 1878; in other
cases they were independent sculptures, described by
the art historian Emilio Lavagnino as remarkable works,
for the emotion and spontaneity that animates them 2 .
In actual fact, to this day, besides the present head,
only nine small sculptures are known: four of
them are preserved at the Museo Barbella of Chieti
(formerly the Puglielli Collection), while the others
were scattered amongst the collections of some of the
artist’s friends (formerly the Nuccio, Bossi, and Lucà
Dazio Collections). Although the initial inspiration for
Michetti’s sculptural style was the work of his friend
Costantino Barbella, Michetti’s work is distinguished
by a lighter, more nuanced and less realistic touch.
His poses are also more original, in contrast to the
more conventional sculptural tradition followed
by Barbella. Michetti’s soft, sensitive depiction of
skin was, in some cases, enhanced by a patina of
a subtle film of oil brushed onto the dry surface.
Michetti was also interested in the roughness of the
early sculptures of Gemito (who made a splendid
portrait of Michetti), but in comparison with Gemito’s
solidity, he preferred a more impressionistic airiness,
an interplay of masses and void in which the volumes
are lighter and the contours less regular.
The painters’ practice of creating a sculptural
representation in wax or clay in preparation for the
compositions of their own paintings was quite wellestablished
and had already been adopted by Poussin
for example. In the world of Michetti, undoubtedly
the most significant parallel that can be made is
with Degas and his practice of making preparatory
sculptures and photographs. In both cases the little
sculptures were not meant to be exhibited, but
constituted an intimate study – sometimes, but not
always, in preparation for a painting – whose exquisite
shape achieved a highly poetic independence of
expression.
The small number of surviving works of this kind may
be explained by the bombing that destroyed most of
his studio during the Second World War. Michetti
was in the habit, however, of giving works of this kind
to his friends and therefore some have survived in
private collections rather than in museums.
This small, beautiful head, with its mouth slightly
open, comes from an American collection and might
have been used for the figure of a child on the left half
of the painting La pesca delle telline, 1878 (Rome,
Palazzo Margherita, Embassy of the United States).
Translated from a text by Fabio Benzi
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