"Still life with armour"

CARLO DONATI

Carlo Donati was born in Verona in 1894 and is unanimously regarded as one of the greatest Veronese artists of all times. The list of Donati's works is very long. For example, recalling only the frescoes in Verona: the chapel of the fallen of St. Luke, in the churches of Caselle di Sommacampagna, Azzago and in Cerro, valuable and still fresh realisations due to a mysticism that was Donati's natural predisposition. And a unique achievement for a Veronese artist: the complex decoration for the National Church of Italians in Bucharest executed in the 1920s on behalf of the Italian government: hundreds of faces (they all look like portraits) and, behind them, the façades of hundreds of Italian basilicas. Alongside his profession as a fresco painter, in demand and sought after also at an international level - for the church in Bleggio, his father's birthplace, it was Emperor Franz Joseph himself who asked for his intervention in 1911, followed by an invitation to work again for the churches in what was then the Tyrol - Donati carried out a rich research as a portrait painter, soon achieving important results with the ‘Portrait of Cardinal Luigi di Canossa’ successfully presented at the Turin Exhibition in 1900, the ‘Portrait of the Engineer Rodolofo Angheben’ in 1910, ‘Portrait of King Victor Emmanuel III’ of 1917-18 or “Self-portrait with the angel of death” of 1934; numerous rapid watercolours of landscapes close to the taste of Moggioli and Rossi and a repertoire between the secular and the sacred with which, from 1909 onwards, he was present at the Venetian Biennales, together with his wife Ildegarda Dalla Porta, a refined performer of cameos on ivory. Until the 1935 Biennale at which he was not accepted because his painting was judged old, out of time. And it is precisely from this serious public failure that I believe we must start in order to get to know this artist, who was somewhat isolated in the city context, even though his twenty-five years of teaching at the School of Art certainly influenced many young artists and so did the profession of fresco painter who needed assistants: among his youngest pupils were Angelo Zamboni and Pino Casarini. In his oil paintings, the most important achievement is certainly the ‘Via Crucis’ painted for the church of San Luca in 1920 on the commission of the parish priest Monsignor Chiot, presented in Venice in 1922 and unanimously praised: fourteen large stations in which the figure of Christ dressed in the sagum, rough red woollen robe imposed by the soldiers on the crucified, which occupies the entire vertical size of these panels that remained in St. Luke's until 1978, then relegated to the Monsignor Carraro Centre and there abandoned until the 2000 exhibition in St. Peter's in Carnario ‘Sacred Art in Verona - Carlo Donati, Agostino Pegrassi, Albano Vitturi’. commissioned by Bishop Flavio Roberto Carraro. In this masterpiece, too, one senses the European interweavings that Donati, a pupil of Napoleone Nani at the Accademia Cignaroli where he graduated in 1893, was not always able to absorb and digest: from the Nazarene taste and purists to Art Nouveau, from the jugendstil of the Viennese and Monegasque secessions to a return to the 15th century when not to late Gothic or neo-Gothic forms of painting. Let us say that there is a bit of everything and sometimes with modest achievements that justified his exclusion from the 1935 Biennale, even though the same jury that did not want Donati accepted other artists who were certainly less up-to-date than him. Here are the words of the artist, regarding his rich harvest of frescoes and his ideal, if not ideological, choices: ‘I renounced formal research, the artist's complacent wealth, to simply tell the truth. I had to paint for the uncultivated, for the inducted, for peasants, for children; I painted everything and everyone; life, death, faith, the sacraments, angels and saints, Christ and the Virgin; I gave pasture to the eyes of the connoisseurs and the ignorant and if the refined judged me naive, the simple found me clear’. And at the ‘Fiorentina Primaverile’ in 1922, where he exhibited four ‘sacred’ works together with his wife Ildegarda Dalla Porta, the presenter wrote of Donati's specific quality as follows: ‘...knowing how to transport sacred facts into a palpitating actuality, whose transcendence and solemnity would seem to be very remote from the spirit so poisoned by positivism and so lacking in poetic and fabulous sentiment of modern life. And all this is combined in Donati with a faculty outside of which there is no true art: the effectiveness and mastery of expression, the clarity and harmony of form'. This was the story of Carlo Donati up to those years, then the progressive isolation from the research of a city that lived with strength and originality the experiences of the best European artistic research in Zamboni, Vitturi, Zancolli, Beraldini, Nardi, if it allowed him to win prizes such as that of the Virtuosi del Pantheon in 1929, and to receive commissions for even complex fresco cycles right up to the end of his days, it did not allow him to open up to the new that the difficult times that the whole of Europe was experiencing matured in the research and experimentation of the 20th century after the great crisis of 1929. However, many years later, the comparison of the best Donati with all other Italian artists holds up and places this humble and simple artist among the masters of early 20th century Italy. Carlo Donati died in Verona on 4 October 1949.