Models in the study

The painting won the II Bergamo Prize in 1940 with the favorable votes of Giulio Carlo Argan and Ottone Rosai but arousing the dissent of Roberto Farinacci; it entered the Pinacoteca at the express wish of the then superintendent of the Galleries, Guglielmo Pacchioni. The work, with its rejection of rhetoric and implicit condemnation of the prevarications of Fascism-suggested by the theme of the “massacre of the innocents” in the canvas in the background-is the culmination of a quest focused on the tools and spaces of the painter’s craft, a craft interpreted with a profound sense of ethics by Mafai, who said in 1938, “These are dangerous but extraordinary times. If I could…choose a time in history and a craft, I would choose this time and the craft of the painter. The conditions today are historically privileged, provided one has the strength and internal freedom necessary in such dangerous times.”