La strada bianca

A long road, blanched by the noonday sun, angles towards the far-off back of the composition. It is flanked on the left by a shoulder of greenery, silvery as it too is pierced by light; on it rest, nearly weightless, the simple cubes of two houses, without shadow.
At this time Morandi’s longest period of etching “alongside” painting was drawing to a close – the period stretching from 1927 to 1933-34. These intense last two years of etching produced such masterpieces as Natura morta a tratti sottilissimi and Grande natura morta scura, crowded and darkened, “tragic” or “melancholy” as this capital work has been called. In this etching, Morandi tends towards a different feeling: for one last time he appears to regain the calm, constructive sense of space that marked some of the 19th-century French painting he most loved – Corot above all. This view of the landscape of Grizzana – the hillside village near Bologna where Morandi usually spent his summers – slips into a luminous diapason that seems to drown all perturbation of the soul in this “remote echo of an infinitely dusty summer” (to cite Francesco Arcangeli).