Due donne

The two women face the viewer. The one on the left is near-frontal, although turned slightly to the right, the other turns just as slightly leftwards. The two faces are separate, each ideally located within a space of its own, no links between them. This mode is typical of the pseudo-fragment theme found not only in Campigli and his Italian contemporaries but also in the archaicist wing of the “return to order”. The citation of the ancient world is quite different from the sort of harking back found in the 18th-century “poetics of ruins” or in Neoclassicism. Instead it relates to the “disinherited Greek statues” that Roberto Longhi saw in De Chirico as witnesses to the crisis in the relations between present and past in European culture. Dated 1929, Due donne is characteristic of Campigli’s mature style.