Overview
Giulio Aristide Sartorio, a frequent visitor to the Caffè Greco in Rome, was a key figure in the nascent Italian Symbolist movement and a member of the association “In Arte Libertas”. His work was already represented at the first edition of the Venice Biennale, of which he would become a regular participant and also a collaborator. At the suggestion of Antonio Fradeletto, secretary general of the Biennale, in the spring of 1906 Sartorio agreed to create a large decorative cycle to be placed in the central hall of the 1907 International Exposition.
He was entrusted with the official task of illustrating the Poem of Human Life on the basis of ancient mythology. In the four main scenes – Light, Darkness, Love, Death – alternating with ten vertical canvases (where Grace and Art are represented supported by manly energy) the artist presents a dramatic vision of life from birth to death. Between the two extremes are the allegories of Darkness and the divergence between the figures of Eros and Himeros, good and bad love. The complex iconography developed by Sartorio, approved by Gabriele d’Annunzio, is a synthesis of the Mediterranean world with Nordic culture. Devoid of architectural elements and developed in monochrome, the pictorial cycle is notable for its exceptional representation of figures in movement, which in the canvases of Darkness and Death take on a rotating form, confirming the symbolic intent of the whole. To complete the approximately 230 square meters of the work in just nine months, Sartorio adopted a rather rapid painting technique: “I used a mixture of wax, turpentine and poppyseed oil”. This is confirmed by analyses by the Laboratory of Conservation Sciences at the DAIS, Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice. The fourteen scenes, installed for the inauguration of the 1907 exhibition, remained in place for the following edition and were then transferred to Ca’ Pesaro as a gift from Victor Emmanuel III to the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna of Venice in 1909.
The cycle’s complex history has left evident marks in the conservation of this extraordinary work. Its latest restoration, in 2018-2019, produced extensive scholarly documentation of it, valuable not just for choosing the appropriate form of conservation, but also for continuing care of this splendid example of Italian painting of the early 20th century. To fully understand the significance of Sartorio’s great cycle, its context has been reconstructed through documents from various archives and a selection of national and foreign works exhibited at the Biennale in the same years, which were then added to the collections in Ca’ Pesaro. All these materials, together with the complete display of the cycle itself and documentation of its restoration, form the staple of the current exhibition project.
