Francesco Trombadori (Siracusa 1886 - Rome 1961)

Francesco Trombadori (Siracusa, 1886 – Rome 1961) was one of the group that began meeting regularly during the 1920s in the “Third Room” of the Caffè Aragno. This was not a structured movement but an environment in which writers such as Ardengo Soffici, Emilio Cecchi, Vincenzo Cardarelli, and Giuseppe Ungaretti, artists like Spadini, Donghi, Francalancia, and art historians like Roberto Longhi conducted a dialogue among quite divergent positions, from Metphysical painting to revivals of 17th-century classicism or harking back to archaic and primitive art.
All these positions met and in a fashion were synthesized in the work of Francesco Trombadori. His depiction of scenes is characterized by a perfectly clean composition, founded on a sense of perspective with no visual special effects, simple and clear. The emotional impact of this painting depends on the solemn immobility of a landscape portrayed in its essential structures. In keeping with the lesson of Giorgio Morandi, Trombadori bends the use of light into a particular type of tonalism, thus escaping from the most rigid sort of Novecento painting, and above all from that tendency’s rhetoric.
Trombadori took part in the first Novecento Italiano group exhibition organized by Margherita Sarfatti at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan in 1926 and participated actively in the intellectual life of the day, as a critic as well as a painter. He was one of the first to note, and to appreciate, the arrival on the Roman art scene of Scipione and Mafai, painters who were coming into their own with an artistic sense going beyond the “return to order”.