Landscape

It is the work of Cézannian ascendancy, of “miraculous” and “legendary” accomplishment that Cesare Brandi evokes at the beginning of his essay Cammino in Morandi, which appeared in 1939 in “Le Arti,” with which Morandi makes his debut, already an adult before he even had a history, capable of painting “without uncertainty and in possession of a language destined to refine itself but not to change its terms,” already with “the gift of poetic transfiguration, the proceeding by discreet allusions, the rejection of the subject as the reason for being or at least as the main reason for the painting.”

The painting, published by Mario Broglio in “Valori Plastici,” was part of a group of works given by the artist to the magazine’s backers (in addition to Broglio, Mario Girardon and Flaminio Martellotti), then sold to Vittorio Barbaroux’s Milan gallery, which put them on the market between 1935 and 1938. Vitali’s purchase dates from those dates.