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  Graduated in Literature with a History/Art focus in Turin, Master’s in “Artworks Anti-Counterfeiting” in Pietrasanta, she has been living and working for many years in Florence.

  In addition to teaching, she works as an Art Critic and consultant for Artists, Collectors and Gallery Owners.

  She has curated and continues to curate solo shows for Artists and writes readings, reviews and printed catalogues for Artists worldwide.

  She also writes about theatre and for actors.

  She collaborates with cultural magazines, both print and online.

A CRITICAL TEXT OF HIS - EDGAR DEGAS IN FLORENCE

Genesis of a masterpiece

About this important artist, whose centenary of death falls in this year 2017, much is known; yet, oddly, critics gloss over certain facts that are actually well documented. For example, little weight is given to the role in his artistic training of the long journey he made through Italian lands between 1855 and 1858. Nor is there, in writings devoted to him, any confirmation of the fact that he certainly spoke Italian as well as French, since both languages were within the competence of his father, Pierre Auguste Hiacynthe Degas, born in Naples in 1807 to an Italian mother.

These two details seem decisive to me for the Artist’s youth training and also for fully understanding the scope of the training period in Italy throughout the entire life of the man and the artist.

Many biographies mention artistic studies undertaken by Degas in Paris at the Académie, but the documentary evidence is clear: Edgar, as he was called in the family, avoiding the first name Hilaire, which would have caused confusion with his paternal grandfather, stayed only a few months at the Académie lessons in Paris, and left at once for Italy, where he was expected by his Grandfather and by a large family.

The first stop of the journey is Naples, where uncles, aunts and cousins, Morbilli and Cicerale, await him with Grandfather Hilaire. He stays in summer at the villa in Capodimonte and then reaches Rome, where he plans to deepen his studies by attending the lessons at Villa Giulia. In Rome he befriends other French and Italian artists, but the stay is cut short by a letter from Grandfather calling him back to Naples: he is unwell, the first signs of the illness that will lead him to death, and he wants his beloved grandson by his side, the first male of the new generation of the family, the one who carries on the surname and also the name.

During the two stays with his Grandfather, the Artist produces two portraits of the old gentleman: one in colour, full-length, elegantly dressed, seated on a sofa in the Capodimonte villa; the second, of the face only, drawn on paper in red chalk.

After the long Roman stay, also punctuated by trips to places that stirred the young Artist’s interest—Viterbo, Siena, Orvieto, Assisi, where the encounter with Giotto is dramatic, with great evocative power—he heads back up the peninsula, and a stop in Florence is unavoidable.

Not only art awaits him in this city, but also Aunt Laure with her husband Gennaro Bellelli, an anti-Bourbon political exile, and their two daughters Giovanna and Giulia.

The Bellelli family lives in Piazza Maria Antonia, in the new buildings just erected with the expansion within the city walls, in the residential area known as the “Orto del Barbano”. In the new district lives Cristiano Banti, a well-known painter, a regular of the “macchia” group, open to new contacts with artists, and the city host of Boldini and Saverio Altamura, the latter also a resident in Barbano. Among Degas’s other friendships in Florence, also thanks to his visits to the “Caffè Michelangelo”, was that with Diego Martelli, theorist and historian of the Macchiaioli group, descendant of an ancient Florentine family—an friendship that would grow stronger during Martelli’s stays in Paris and would culminate in the oil portrait of his friend, painted by Degas in 1879.

Telemaco Signorini recalls Degas as a regular visitor and active participant in the artistic debate on the themes of light and shadow held at the “Caffè Michelangelo”. This testimony definitively confirms Degas’s command of the Italian language, and thus helps us understand how the long period of his journey in Italy was fully lived by both the man and the painter. The importance of this trip and the experience connected to it would remain a human and cultural legacy for the artist’s entire life.

During his stay in Florence, which began in the summer of 1858, the painter’s mind is increasingly absorbed by the idea of creating a large painting that brings together the “memories” of that tour—memories both artistic and emotional—linked to his personal inner search as a young man, as well as to his research and artistic studies: a painting that takes shape and will become the acknowledged masterpiece of the painter’s youth.

For this painting Degas produced a hundred preparatory drawings, which show its crucial importance not only in the artist’s career but also in his life: a work he would never part with, and that would remain in his studio until his death.

Cristiano Banti, seeing the painting at an early stage, is so struck by it that he cites Van Dyck as a reference for the evocative power of the main figure, that is, Aunt Laure.

In Degas’ notebooks from that period we find a note about the painting taking shape in his mind: “I have various ideas for the background. I would like to achieve a certain natural grace together with a nobility I can’t quite define.”

This work, “The Portrait of the Bellelli Family”, was completed only in 1867 after long, slow work in the painter’s Paris studio. The painting, the largest Degas ever made, two by two and a half meters, depicts the Bellelli family’s bourgeois sitting room with all family members present; the scene is entirely dominated by the blue tone of the wallpaper, meant as a “positive” backdrop to a scene that, at first glance, reveals strong tensions.

What anyone notices immediately is the undeniable fact that the four protagonists do not look at one another, nor do they look at the artist portraying them. The first thought, therefore, would be to believe that there were not good relations between the sitters and the painter. But this is disproved by the correspondence between the aunt and the nephew, which instead shows full trust and understanding between them. The two little girls, too, are the subject of tender remarks, noted in Degas’s notebooks, which tell us of those affectionate ties that would always exist between Edgar Degas and the Bellelli cousins, who would be the subject, over the course of their lives, of many works by their cousin, both together and individually.

The four human figures stretch horizontally across the surface of the painting, almost out of a horror vacui that    does not want any space left unattended. From left to right we find first Giovanna, the only one looking straight ahead, almost guiding the viewer into the scene. The serenity painted on the face of this wise little girl      is contrasted by her mother’s hand which, firmly resting on her daughter’s shoulder, seems to claim possession of her or at least that female solidarity so powerful when it runs from mother to daughter. A fifth member of the family is portrayed in the painting: the little dog which, perhaps bored by that mute and spiteful gathering, is moving away to the right; indeed its head is already outside the canvas, almost as if the painting were a photographic snapshot.

Just as the family members take up the painting’s width, so, vertically          the canvas shows no fewer than six vertical “sections” which, like stage wings, give depth to a space that only seems two-dimensional.                                                                                                               From the left, before the narrow movement that draws mother and daughter closer, one can glimpse a door with a barely suggested window that seems to be one of the painting’s light sources. The wall that begins after this opening is behind the main protagonist, Laure Degas, who, dressed entirely in mourning, occupies a central part of the painting with the bearing of a tragic heroine. The two little girls are also dressed in black, set off by their pure, opulent white aprons; the girls create two pauses, thanks to that white, within the painting’s emotional severity. The girls seem able, through their emotional and affectionate presence, to soothe the mother’s pain, tied as much to the father’s death as to the trials of married life.

Giulia is captured in a distracted pose, typical of children tired of holding still for so long; her body does not touch her mother and, indeed, she seems to lean toward her father who, with his head slightly turned to the left, watches her odd movements. He, placed at the far right of the painting, is seated in a black armchair, perhaps symbolizing his exile, almost absorbed into the fireplace topped by a mirror that defines the depth of the room also through the reflection of a door open onto another space that      reveals a window with a curtain stirred by the air.

At the very center of the composition, standing out against the blue wallpaper, highlighted by a double gilded frame, is the red-chalk portrait of Hilaire Degas, from whose funeral the Daughter has just returned to Florence.

It is easy to see, on reflection, that with the Grandfather’s likeness the painting is also a portrait of the Degas family, at least of a very close-knit part of it, namely the one made up of the father, the favourite daughter, her two daughters and the grandson who bears his name and who is the author of the painting.

The two Hilaires, grandfather and grandson, are ideally facing each other, one at the center of the scene to be painted and the other at the easel, busy painting.

Beyond any thought already formed or formable, it is certain that the painting’s size immediately suggests a work meant to be displayed, but, of course, before 1917 it was seen by a very limited number of people.

It may have happened that, after planning the painting, the interruption of the sittings, due to Laure’s departure for Naples following her father’s death, led the young painter—who had a particularly close bond with his grandfather—to place that portrait at the center of the canvas and, through a “play of mirrors,” to multiply the painting’s meanings well beyond its official title. And that this emotional involvement between the artist and the painting was the reason for the work’s long stay in the painter’s studio.

Finally, it should be noted that, besides Telemaco Signorini’s, there are further accounts of Degas’s command of the Italian language; they  even come to us from Paul Gauguin who, as many sources recall, said that Degas: “… preferred the company of Italian painters such as Boldini, Zandomeneghi, De Nittis, to that of the good French Impressionist painters.”                                                

Even more vivid and engaging is the account given to us by members of the “Club des Polentons”, an association founded by Italians in Paris that brought together lovers of that food as well as opera enthusiasts; this group included many French artists and men of letters such as Degas, Zola and the Goncourt brothers. In reports of some official meetings of these devotees—based on polenta and operatic musical conversation—Degas’s lively participation at the banquets is mentioned, to the point that he sang not only Italian arias but also Neapolitan songs in the local dialect, which he had surely learned during his many stays in the Bourbon capital with his family of origin.

Edgar Degas, a great master of painting of all time, had Italian blood in his veins; therefore we Italians can understand his Art more deeply and have one more reason to love and admire him.

Florence, 20  April  2017                                                                                                      Emanuela Catalano

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