Fabrica di Roma

In this depiction of a town in Lazio Donghi ignores the settlement itself in favour of a purely natural space, with no human presence: a sort of gap between two trees, two hulking masses at each side of the canvas, opening in the centre to a horizon formed by the silhouette of a mountain. The painting (1940) shows that Donghi’s obsession for the frozen image – unmoved by the flow of time, in a sense incorruptible because outside the realm of becoming – remained unaltered, always capable of transmission in a language that has lost none of its rigour. Donghi developed the theme of exit from temporal continuity, first set out in De Chirico’s Metaphysical painting, in highly original fashion, based on a realism totally extraneous to the taste for anecdote that had marked the verism of the 19th century.