Alberto Ziveri

Alberto Ziveri was born in Rome in December 1908 and passed away in February 1990. “Ziveri’s realism was never subjected to empty abstractions or political polemics. His is a poetry of reality, not a chronicle of it,” wrote Romeo Lucchese in 1952 about the artist's painting style. Ziveri made his public debut at just twenty years old at the Esposizione di Belle Arti. In 1930, he was called to Milan for military service, joining the Bersaglieri regiment. The uniform became an artistic obsession, reappearing often in his paintings and self-portraits around the time of the war. In 1933, he exhibited at the Galleria Sabatello on Via del Babuino in Rome, alongside Pericle Fazzini. The show received fair critical success. By 1934, Ziveri had developed his personal artistic approach, finding his path in tonalism. Influenced by the work of Piero della Francesca, whom Roberto Longhi had recently brought back to critical attention, Ziveri began pursuing a deep spiritual dimension and a new sense of plasticity, understood as the conquest of spatial sense and light, as seen in Giocatori di Birilli (Bowling Players).

In 1937, Ziveri embarked on a trip to Paris for the International Exposition, which also took him to Belgium and the Netherlands. This experience was pivotal and led to a profound change in his painting, as he would later recall in his memoirs: “[...] in Belgium and the Netherlands I learned a lot, not only from Rembrandt and Vermeer but also from all those Dutch and Flemish artists wrongly considered ‘minor,’ who delve deeply into reality through their craft.” Upon returning to Rome, times were tough. The specter of war loomed ever closer, and Ziveri painted large-scale canvases like La rissa (The Fight) and La lotta di popolane (The Struggle of the Working Women), as if to narrate scenes of everyday life amidst the tragic events that were about to unfold. He found inspiration “mainly in the flowerbeds and the market at Piazza Vittorio, just steps from his home on Via Conte Verde.”

In 1940, he participated in a group exhibition at the Galleria di Roma with friends Guttuso, Fazzini, Tamburi, Montanarini, and Guzzi. The latter wrote the introduction to the catalog, summarizing the meaning of the exhibition in a few words: “No more reality of dreams, but dream of reality. So again, since we are not afraid of words, a new realism.” Ziveri did not fail to make an impression. Among the works, still fresh from the easel, was the controversial Ritratto della Signora Natale (Portrait of Mrs. Natale), where the subject is portrayed like Ziveri’s other women: “plump, plebeian, mature sellers of carrots and cauliflowers, or the wives of tram drivers.” It was in front of this painting that the Fascist official Bruno Bottai decided to have his photo taken. His secretary, Argan, “took notes for an article to be published in the Ministry's magazine Le Arti: there was no doubt that, after the tribute to tradition, the painting’s expression moved beyond mere emotion and immediately reconnected with consciousness. (Ziveri, standing in a corner, thought these were complicated words just to say: ‘realism’).”

Before critics could put down their pens, Ziveri exhibited another enormous and scandalous painting, Giuditta e Oloferne (Judith and Holofernes), at the 1943 Quadriennale. Renzo Vespignani recalled the canvas as “vast and dark, as if scorched by candle smoke. Of Holofernes, I couldn’t say much, but the thigh-baring Judith immediately struck me as a vivid image, beyond the painting, because within it, she was entirely recognizable. She had familiar, desirable scents and sweats, weight in her belly, plebeian arrogance and modesty.” With this painting, Ziveri, much like Pirandello, who at the same time was painting harsh, desolate beaches, seemed to presage the imminent conflict with dramatic clarity.

Once again, it was the bare-legged women and uniformed men populating the brothels he painted toward the end of the war. In these chiaroscuro works, he depicted the monotony and the “craft of living,” as seen in the painting in the Iannaccone Collection. “He worked on the painting for several years, and I had to hide it from him so he would finally move on to another work. That interior was our first bedroom. We had just gotten married, money was tight, so we adapted the room as a studio. All four of the models in the painting are always me, while the soldier is a mannequin,” said Nella, his wife. “We were so jealous of each other; I didn’t want him to have other models, and he couldn’t stand the idea of me sitting on the lap of a real man.”