“In Martini’s transfer of bodies and their actions, I see the exaggerated style of a Barlack [sic], a Maillol, a Mestrovic, which is indeed the style of all decadent and essentially intellectualistic artists.”

Arturo Martini created this sculpture in 1926 at Anticoli Corrado, where he had been living for a couple of years. The letters to his wife speak of the archaic charm of the place and rural life on the one hand and rapidly growing dissatisfaction with the difficult working conditions and shortage of money, at least until 1927, on the other. Alongside fulfilment of his demanding contract with the American sculptor Maurice Sterne and the production of work for the national exhibitions in Rome, Venice and Milan, Martini produced a number of small pieces in terracotta between 1924 and 1926 distinguished by local subject matter and a markedly narrative approach.¹ Some of these were used as illustrations and commented on in 1926 by Carlo Carrà with a certain mistrust of their “intellectualistic and aestheticising character” deriving from precise sources beyond the Alps: “In Martini’s transfer of bodies and their actions, I see the exaggerated style of a Barlack [sic], a Maillol, a Mestrovic, which is indeed the style of all decadent and essentially intellectualistic artists.”² 

When the Contadina (Peasant Woman) was first published in an article that appeared shortly after the artist’s death, it may have been precisely its “Romanesque”, Barlachian style that suggested a dating of 1920, i.e. the period in which Martini was the sculptural representative of the Valori Plastici group. The anonymous author of the article, tentatively identified by Elena Pontiggia as Leonardo Borgese, presents the sculpture as “one of Martini’s very first creations” in terracotta with the arbitrary title La madre.³ The first photograph of the work (fig. 1) was taken by the Milanese Attilio Bacci, who worked directly with contemporary sculptors like Giacomo Manzù at the time. It was then owned by the architect and painter Gigiotti Zanini: his longstanding friendship with the painter and architect from the Tyrol, which perhaps began during the years of Ca’ Pesaro, was fortified during the 1930s and 1940s when they both lived in Milan on either side of the war.⁴ 

Guido Perocco recorded the presence of the work in the collection of the Zanini heirs in Venice in 1966 and assigned it the date of 1924, with which it appeared in the exhibitions connected with the great European rediscovery of Martini in the 1980s. It was then dated 1926 in the general catalogue of 1998, having been purchased in the meantime for the Milanese collection of Claudia Gian Ferrari, from whom Cerruti bought it in the spring of 2003. 

Filippo Bosco

¹ Martini appears to refer to these works as early as the spring of 1925: “I have now started on a series of small terracotta works on various subjects and have no wish to stop until my imagination runs out […] Just think, I’ve already made ten in a few days and they’re all good” (A. Martini, letter to his wife, [early March] 1925, in Le lettere di Arturo Martini 1992, p. 114).

² Carrà C. 1926a, p. 13.

³ Perhaps referring to the fact that Martini’s mother died in 1920, the author wrote as follows: “We have given it the title La madre as a tribute to the artist’s mother, whom we imagine like this recalling the way he often described her to us” (B. 1947, p. 6).

⁴ Fond memories of the Ca’ Pesaro years emerge from the letters of Martini’s last few years, when he lived in Venice and taught at the Accademia: “I am certain that once all the noise and the interest have died down, the most authentic pages of Italian art will still be those of Ca’ Pesaro. The sanctity of that time is so immaculate and authentic that after so much work and maturity, I still feel the need to refer to it in order to see things clearly” (letter from A. Martini to N. Barbantini, 24 August 1944, in Le lettere di Arturo Martini 1992, p. 249). Zanini is recalled only once together with Tullio Garbari and Benvenuto Disertori, who were also from Trentino: “I was a friend of all three and not just for a day. I witnessed their development and was in contact with them for years” (letter from A. Martini to S. Branzi, 4 June 1945, ibid., p. 261).