Natura morta

On the surface, in the foreground and clearly delineated by the shadows that the objects project, we find – isolated, cadenced in the limited space given, in orderly succession and severe alternation of solids and voids – the few objects so infinitely familiar to Morandi: the long-necked bottles, the lamp, the pitcher. The light, whose point of origin is clearly identified at the left of this small still life, is calm, it too without jumps or starts. So the entire canvas vibrates with the almost didactic purpose that appears to guide the artist: to veil the emotion behind his lucid intention to “compose” the presences and the space in a chaste simplicity.
The general catalogue of the artist’s works, on which Morandi himself worked together with Lamberto Vitali, dates this still life to 1944-45: the very earliest time of the painter’s return to his house in Bologna after his wartime “exile” to the hills of Grizzana. Here he found once again, dust-covered in his studio, the objects he was used to paint; and it was to these unchanging pretexts for painting that he returned, with bareness of soul, prudence, the trepidation like of the novitiate. After the freedom of so many landscapes during the war years, this return to the bare simplicity of the still life is like a sign of the intention to start over, in years that promised, for all of Italy, to be no less harsh than those just past.