The five women seated around a table appear to be absorbed, each one immersed in her own thoughts and closed within her posture. Their eyes do not meet. The dynamics of the link between them are played out entirely upon the oval shape of the tablecloth, a white quadrant dotted with things, hands and shadows. In the background, between two walls, a corridor leads towards a series of rooms, directing our gaze along the retreating red tile floor and drawing it towards the interior of the house. 

Mattino (Morning) belongs to the cycle of large tempera paintings produced by Felice Casorati during his early period in Turin, the city he arrived in from Verona in 1918, after the Great War and the death of his father. The subject and the intonation, just like the technique and the format, linked the work to Bambina (Girl) (fig. 1), Un uomo (L’uomo delle botti) (A Man [The Barrel Man]), Una donna (L’attesa) (A Woman [The Wait]) and the Ritratto di Maria Anna De Lisi (Portrait of Maria Anna De Lisi).1 In these figurative paintings, set within the rooms of his home and studio, the artist began one of the most important chapters in his work. Having abandoned the fairy-tale and visionary suggestions of Secessionist inspiration, typical of his season in Verona, Casorati developed a purified, dry and unadorned figuration, a suspense that draws close to the atmospheres of Metaphysical painting. The condition of solitude, key to the entire group of tempera paintings from 1918-20, is recreated in the family of lone women in Mattino, highlighted by the carved poses of the figures, edged by dark lines marked out on the marbled tempera backgrounds. The emotive style that dominates the scene is echoed by the hollow containers on the dinner table, by the numbered white bowls, threaded with blue and devoid of milk. “Had I not been the target of so much pain at the time,” recalled Casorati in 1943, “these angular dazzled and fearful figures would never have been born, immersed in a spectral light in which a welcome note of colour, of gentle accents, would be sought in vain.”²  

Morning was exhibited for the first time in summer 1920 in Venice, during the Esposizione degli artisti dissidenti di Ca’ Pesaro at the Galleria Geri-Boralevi where, in counterpoint to the Sketch for the Painting “Evening”,3 it formed part of a set of sixteen recent works, comprising paintings, drawings and woodcut prints (fig. 2). In June of the following year, the tempera was exhibited again in Turin in the Mostra d’Arte in the rooms of the Mole Antonelliana, where it was commented on by the critic and journalist Emilio Zanzi, who interpreted it in the light of the post-war context, associating it with “the unhappiness of certain families without bread and without peace”.4 The reflection on the political role of culture and art that Felice Casorati shared during these years with Piero Gobetti, the young intellectual who founded Energie Nove magazine, affected the painter’s sensibility and his focus on the social concerns that permeated the industrial, working-class city of Turin at the time. In an article from 1920, Gobetti saw Mattino as the ultimate destination of an “organic line of development”, generated by Maria Anna De Lisi through the “mediation” of Girl, in a sequence linked by an “admirable sentimental unity”, built on the “sense of mystery as a void”.5 In Felice Casorati Pittore, the monograph of 1923 that he both wrote and published, Gobetti shifted the focus to the artificial effects, overseen by the “luminous arrangement” of the painting but also its “literary nightmare” mood.6
It was during this period that Mattino entered the collection of Alfredo Casella, the painter and composer whom the artist frequented in the circle of Riccardo and Cesarina Gualino. The meeting, dated to 1922, probably took place during the performances held in the couple’s private theatre, inside their Turin house, designed by Casorati himself with the architect Alberto Sartoris. It was here, on 29 April 1925, that the musician directed the Concert dedicated to Igor Stravinsky; here that their mutual admiration was triggered, sealed by the commission of a portrait.7 The “affinity of intent” that links the two, the common “desire to build” in keeping with the principles of Neoclassicism, is the motif with which Casorati associates Casella’s decision to purchase Mattino for his collection and place it on the wall above his piano.8
In his account, published in 1958, the painter cites a letter from the musician, happy to possess the painting which however is too big to enter his studio in Rome, and therefore, he writes: “For now it is on loan to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Valle Giulia”.9 In 1958, Luigi Carluccio included the painting among the plates in the catalogue accompanying of Casorati’s solo exhibition at the Centro Culturale Olivetti in Ivrea, despite the loan refusal. In that painting exemplary of the artist’s work from the 1920s he perceives the “sharp intelligence of how things impact upon the space”, the “squaring of the volumes”, the “bark” that envelops the figures. 

The work featured in the major anthological exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s, entering the Cerruti Collection at the turning point between the two decades thanks to the mediation of Mitzi Sotis, who organised the Casorati. Opere 1914/1959 exhibition, curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, in her Roman gallery in 1983. 

[Giorgina Bertolino]

1 Bertolino, Poli 1995, respectively pp. 225-226, no. 152, ill.; p. 227, no. 154, ill.; pp. 218-219, no. 135, ill., pp. 215-216, no. 131, ill. For the dating of the Portrait of Maria Anna De Lisi to 1919 see G. Bertolino, “Come deve essere una sala da esposizione? La funzione di Ca’ Pesaro nella carriera di Felice Casorati”, in Portinari 2018, p. 119. 

2 F. Casorati, “Felice Casorati parla della sua vita”, conference held in the Aula Magna of the University of Pisa, 26 May 1943, in Turin 1985a, pp. 20-21. The italic script was used in the 1985 transcription to highlight “the definitive pencil lines over one or more erased variants”, Turin1985a, p. 14. 

3 The Sketch, cited in the list of works (Venice 1920, p. 20, no. 117), can be identified as Evening or Sisters, in Bertolino, Poli 1995, p. 227, no. 156, ill. 

4 Zanzi 1921.

5 Gobetti 1920, pp. 233-235.

6 Id. 1923, p. 97.

7 Bertolino, Poli1995, pp. 280-282, no. 272, ill.

8 Casorati 1958, p. 67.

9 Ibid.