Amalassunta

Osvaldo Licini exhibited the first Amalassuntas at the Venice Biennale in 1950. In a letter to Giuseppe Marchiori dated 21 May of that year, foreseeing that he might not be able to attend the opening, he wrote, with the touch of irony that always features in his correspondence, modulating, spacing out or veiling the lyricism of his images: “However, should I not be there and should some curious soul turn to you, the spotless and fearless art critic, to enquire about this mysterious ‘Amalassunta’ who isn’t yet really spoken about much, please reply, in my name, without the shadow of a doubt, smilingly, that Amalassunta is our beautiful Moon, guaranteed silver for eternity, personified in a few words, friend of every somewhat tired heart.”¹

In order to baptise his astral icon, poised between pagan and Christian metaphors, Licini chose to evoke the Marian name of Assunta, inserting it into the name of the Ostrogoth queen Amalasuntha, in a play of words that can be interpreted in different ways. Changeable, like all the characters that feature in his paintings between the 1940s and 1950s, from the Olandesi volanti (Flying Dutchmen) to the Angeli ribelli (Rebel Angels), his Amalassuntas are figures in constant transformation, the result of a montage of moon-faces and closed or open hands, sometimes winged, on which numbers, letters, stars and hearts can be inscribed. Angelic figures and aerial horizons made their appearance in Licini’s painting right from the outset, in the late 1910s, and had clandestinely animated his abstract works in the 1930s.²

His trip to northern Europe and Paris in 1931 and, the following year, his relationship with the Galleria del Milione in Milan, which actively promoted Rationalism and Abstract Art in Italy, played an important role in bringing him closer to groups and magazines such as Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. The peculiarity, or rather the anomaly of his adhesion to abstraction, had been openly stated in 1935, during his first solo exhibition in Milan, in an open letter in which he described painting as “irrational art dominated by fantasy and imagination, namely by poetry” and announced his intention to demonstrate that “geometry can become sentiment”.³

In 1938 he met the philosopher and scholar of Oriental disciplines Franco Ciliberti, who accepted his contribution to the sole issue of Valori primordiali magazine and with whom the artist, from his isolation in Monte Vidon Corrado, kept up correspondence until 1945. These letters have recently been published in their entirety, playing a decisive role in shedding light on the original sacredness of the totemic figures and the sign-based alphabets that emerge in his paintings from the late 1940s onwards.⁴

Full recognition of the Europe-wide value of Licini’s work, acknowledging his position along the path marked out by Paul Klee and Joan Miró thanks to his independence and originality, only developed in the late 1950s, with the tribute paid to him in Turin by Luigi Carluccio during the first Pittori d’oggi: Francia-Italia exhibition, and the following year with the retrospective exhibition at the Centro Culturale Olivetti curated by Giuseppe Marchiori. Recognition also came with Licini’s solo display at the XXIX Venice Biennale, which earned him the Grand Prize for Painting just a few months after his death, not without some controversy.⁵

Out of the two Amalassuntas in the Cerruti Collection, the one against a blue background, with a few alterations and some colour loss, comes from the Galleria Rizziero, initially based in Teramo and then in Pescara, which presented it in various exhibitions from 1990 onwards. This painting resembles a mirror image of an Amalassunta Against a Vermilion Background dated by Marchiori to 1949.⁶ The separating line that constantly animates and diversifies the divide between the terrestrial and celestial space – the horizon that, as Francesco Bartoli noted, is both “environmental and erotic”⁷ – is gathered up here to mark out the profiles of two breasts/hills, on which the white moonlike face levitates, without definitively detaching itself from the earth.

[Maria Teresa Roberto]

¹ In Licini 1974, p. 148.

² See F. Pirani, “Metafore dell’aria di Osvaldo Licini. Tra memoria e oblio”, in Venice 2018-19, pp. 193-203.

³ O. Licini, “Lettera aperta al Milione”, in Bollettino della Galleria del Milione, no. 39, 19 April – 1 May 1935, now in Licini 1974, p. 99.

⁴ Monte Vidon Corrado 2020.

⁵ See S. Salvagnini, “Osvaldo Licini e la critica d’arte”, in Venice 2018-19, pp. 205-233.

⁶ Marchiori 1968, pl. LI, np., no. 267.

⁷ F. Bartoli, “Figure dell’incastro e metafore dell’aria nel linguaggio di Licini”, in Licini 1974, pp. 43-61 (cit. p. 61).