La cité des promesses

The painting was made in Paris in 1928 along with five other subjects for the new home of the great merchant Léonce Rosemberg, who had decided to entrust the decoration of each room to painters from his stable: Giorgio de Chirico, Savinio precisely, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Auguste Herbin, Max Ernst and others.

Similar to L’île des charmes, the other canvas of larger horizontal format and darker intonation that served as its pendant along with a third canvas that has been untraceable for years, this “transparent city,” a fantastical and enigmatic view, is based on an accumulation of ruins of highly evocative geometric shapes of elusive meaning, silhouetted against a sky of iris colors.

Close in some respects to the extraordinary series of “Monuments to Toys” of the same period, the painting and the five others made for Rosemberg are, in Savinio’s own words, “landscapes of the air…figurations that, in transparency, are outlined in the midst of the earth’s atmosphere…similar to the vision of the new Jerusalem that, at sunrise and sunset, even a mortal eye can catch in the air.”