Paesaggio con elci

This “Landscape with Holm-oaks” (1928) was painted during a phase when Donghi had basically fully developed his figurative programme. Stasis, the feeling of fatal stillness of trees which, with their dense foliage, occupy the entire field of vision, springs from the avid gaze of the view in search of the tiniest detail. The painting suggests such a total absence of motion as to confer upon this view of slices of nature an eerie un-naturalism. Donghi’s “magical realism” is not at all based on the verist, late-19th-century tendency to subordinate form to even the most anecdotal details. It is not the mere depiction of an event or a story as image but a quasi-hallucinatory vision whose implacable evidentiality transcends anecdotalism. This highly particular type of realism of which Donghi is the leading Italian representative – giving rise to an independent Italian variant of this major international artistic trend – engenders a mental and psychological attitude of amazed questioning.