Mario Mafai

Mario Mafai was born in Rome in 1902, where he passed away in March 1965. Despite his mother encouraging him to pursue technical studies, he, being introverted and imaginative, enrolled in the Scuola Libera del Nudo, where he met Gino Bonichi, who would become a lifelong friend, in 1924. A year later, he entered the academy, creating quite a stir with a Lithuanian Jewish woman who had lived in London: Antonietta Raphaël. From the outset, a special bond formed between Mafai and Raphaël, and in 1929, together with Gino Bonichi, known as Scipione, they established an indomitable artistic trio that Roberto Longhi referred to as “La Scuola di Via Cavour,” named after the street where the Mafai-Raphaël couple resided and which Scipione frequented.

Mafai's romantic visions were born from walks along the Imperial Fora in the company of his wife Antonietta and his friend Scipione. Like a "hunter with a pencil in hand," the painter translated what he saw into instant sketches, reworking them in his studio on Via Cavour. In his early landscapes, including Strada con casa rossa, one can recognize Mafai's ability to imagine and find refuge in small things, creating an alternative to the “angular landscape of twentieth-century Europe.” The sky in this Strada con casa rossa, with its vibrant colors, illuminates the composition. The visual focal point is the tiny red house at the end of the winding path, to the left of the exit from the Caracalla Baths promenade. The villa, precariously suspended among the trees held back by a low wall, appears almost unreachable.

A year later, Tramonto sul lungotevere was created, marking a definitive transition from “view” to “vision,” reinterpreting Roman landscapes in a consciously dreamlike manner. An arbitrary and descending perspective depicts the panorama beyond Ponte Garibaldi, with the dense foliage of the Aventine and unstable architecture in the distance. The disintegration of space, which retains an equilibrium through the calibration of dark and light patches, draws from the inspirations of Chagall, influenced by the stories of his companion Antonietta Raphaël. The sudden bursts of color and the skillfully balanced play of backlighting used by the artist to transfigure the sunsets of a hot, sweltering Rome stem from the tireless study of Venetian painters and El Greco, to whom Mafai had dedicated his youth alongside Scipione.

An interesting comparison was offered by the collector, who added to his collection the painting depicting the same view of the Lungotevere, painted more than ten years later and reflecting the changing historical-political climate, approaching the Demolizioni. After spending a year in Paris with his companion and artist Antonietta Raphaël, and following the birth of three daughters, Mafai faced the death of his great companion in life and passion, Scipione, in 1933. Left alone, despite the increasingly dark political and cultural climate, he continued to paint. “To react against the rampant individualism of those easy and euphoric days, I wanted to portray men and women not as identifiable individuals but as generic, anonymous figures—images of a naked humanity caught in its earthly existential condition.” It was in this atmosphere that Doppio ritratto was born, which the following year, in 1934, participated in the Venice Biennale, where the artist's face is clearly recognized in the foreground, while behind him, the female figure appears shrouded in mystery, though it can be traced back to a familiar face.

During these years, even the flowers gradually faded, drooped, and withered for Mafai, serving as a reflection on the inexorable passage of time and contemplation of his own destiny. “Mafai's flowers […] have nothing in common with the ‘refined’ and gossipy flowers of De Pisis […]. Nothing like these flowers gives the key to Mafai's poetic pictorial spirit, the secret of his intimacy and mystery,” wrote Roberto Melli. In the bouquet of carnations and violets from the Iannaccone collection, the petals and stems are depicted solely through robust brushstrokes, whose impasto vibrates in search of the desired nuance. A full, sunny light strikes the background, which seems almost plastered, allowing one to fully appreciate the subtle tonal vibrations of the painting. Renato Guttuso noted this, defining these Garofani bianchi, then in the Natale collection, as “the most acute and exhausted pictorial experience of Mafai, where tonal vibration beats white on white with millesimal differences, and the material, though thick, is reduced to breath.” Cesare Brandi later saw in the “horn” created by the paper enclosing the bouquet a reminiscence of Giorgio Morandi, whom Mafai certainly looked up to, though he moved in a different direction, opting for “an almost liquid and transparent color, like a mist floating in the air, where the white of the carnations is softened, almost dimmed.”