(Ferrara 1885 – Rome 1958)
Self-portrait, 1933
Oil on canvas, 62 x 50 cm
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 578
L’Self-portrait by Roberto Melli was purchased by the City of Ferrara in 1934 and is one of the first works of the twentieth century to enter the civic collections, along with the Roman Forum by Achille Funi (1930) and the Still Life to the Sweet Homeland donated by De Pisis (1932). In the 1950s this first nucleus was exhibited at Palazzo dei Diamanti in a room dedicated to “moderns.”
Melli attached particular importance to this Self-portrait and wanted it to appear in the personal room set up in 1954 at the XXVII Venice Biennale. The artist portrays herself there with her gaze turned toward the viewer, manifesting a full awareness of her role. The painting is set on a play of geometries and is marked by planes of light and areas of color. We can still recognize in it an echo of the volumetric and sculptural research of his youth.
After World War I, the artist had abandoned sculpture and chosen to devote himself to painting in order to better focus on the relationship between the object and its surroundings. His goal was not to faithfully imitate nature but to extract from it a synthesis of form, space and color that looked to the example of Cézanne but also the lesson of Piero della Francesca. This reflection matured in the early 1930s. Just in 1933, Melli as a critic signed with Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli the Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism advocating tonal research that relies on color to restore the essence of reality, in full accordance with theSelf-Portrait: “The art of painting is relationship of color that arouses the architecture of the painting, the distribution of its spaces, the typical essentiality of its forms.”
