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 <strong>Luc</strong>à 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 160
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Jean-Luc Baroni
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