Paesaggio di Anticoli

From the 1920s onwards the town of Anticoli Corrado, a small village set into the hillside in Lazio, was the site of long sojourns by numerous Roman painters (and not only, Arturo Martini also stayed there). Pirandello often portrayed the surrounding hillsides and valley below. As was typical of his work, the extremely high horizon closes off and restricts the composition to an almost uncontrollable clenched fist of paint – where greens and earth colours dominate – which he attacks with his pallet knife and the back of his paintbrush.
And yet, compared with other images from this late wartime period, when the painter divided his time between Anticoli and Rome (finding provisional lodging in a room in the French Academy at Villa Medici), this town appears much less dramatic, saturated as it is in an airy, diffuse luminosity. Many of his more recent Anticoli landscapes (it is impossible to say whether this is one of them) were later exhibited in his major solo show held at the Secolo Gallery. He wrote shortly afterwards about the show, which had included more than forty works, to his sister Lietta, in Chile, sounding a note of uncharacteristic pride: “the exhibition was one of most successful organized this year in Rome.”