“The metaphysical world… is made of boxes, cards, ladders. And so the discoveries and the climbing up along the ways of new truths become possible and logical.”

This work forms part of the pictorial cycle that Alberto Savinio dedicated in 1928 to the man without an identity, portraying him in a variety of different ways, including the metal mannequin, nude or statue without a face or with his face hidden from view. A strong narrative vein runs through the cycle - which includes OEdipe et Antigone (Oedipus and Antigone), Les châtelains (The Squires), La mère et l’enfant (Mother and Child), Gladiatori (Gladiators) and La bataille (The Battle)¹ - fuelled by references that unite the works within a wide-reaching and complex visual account. 

The crux of the painting is a sensual female nude surrounded by three iron mannequins. The four figures, all of whom have their head wrapped in a mesh, are set within a sculptural configuration, a tower of bodies and polyhedrons elevated between earth and sky. The bright colours of the figures and the volumes stand out between the earthy mass that looms on the left, achieved by means of the sparse application of browns and siennas, and the strip of night, at the top right, that resounds with hues of Prussian blue and indigo. “Nuit complète, mais le ciel est bleu. L’homme-chauve gît par terre. Des homme-cibles en tôle sont rangés contre le mur […] Des homme noirs en fer forgé passent…” (Full night, but the sky is blue. The bald man is lying on the ground. Man-targets in jail are lined up against the wall […] Black men in chains pass…), wrote Savinio in 1914 in Les chants de la mi-mort.² The artist, who was not yet a painter, had sketched out the characters for the Scènes dramatiques: tailors’ dummies, prototypes for the metaphysical mannequin that de Chirico introduced at the same time in paintings such as the Nostalgia del poeta (Nostalgia of the Poet).³ The mannequins of 1928 descend from that family of bald or tin men, with which Savinio, in the Paris of the 1910s, had echoed the faceless man of The Musician of Saint-Merry by his friend Guillaume Apollinaire. He had contributed to furthering the repertoire of humanoids produced by the avant-garde movements, in an idiom interpreted in painting by the automatons of Fernand Léger and Fortunato Depero and the mechanomorphic dynamics of Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée (The Bride), all the way through to the mechanical portraits by Francis Picabia. 

In Voilà mon rêve (Here Is My Dream), the artist reunites the metallic characters of Les chants de la mi-mort (The Songs of Half-Death) and arranges them around the nude, seated above a dizzying drop. In doing so he reflects upon the relations between human and mechanical, male and female, shifting the comparison to classic and modern, realism and abstraction, metaphysical and surrealist. This all unfolds within a dream, evoked by the spiralling structure of the composition, an upwards vortex that absorbs the incongruous contrasts between flesh and iron, fabric and stone, organic forms and geometric objects, the top of which acts as a prelude to a further turning point. The space, comprised between the rock glimpsed at the bottom and the mountainous peak at the top, is a space that is climbed with difficulty, crowded with presences, scaled on different levels. The “metaphysical world”, thinks Savinio, “…is made of boxes, cards, ladders. And so the discoveries and the climbing up along the ways of new truths become possible and logical.”⁴ The dimension of the dream and sleep, in which the artist explains that he lives in a “more precipitous way than in life”, is presided over by the “Hermes Oneiropompos”.⁵ Mercury, as he prefers to call him, is the tutelary deity called upon to superintend mobility and excursions into reality and the imaginary, into space and time. The journey through history, particularly the history of art, proceeds through citations and retracing, used to generate friction through anachronism. As a result, the base beneath the figures in Voilà mon rêve has both an abstract geometrical form and the shape of a predella of a Madonna enthroned, with the steps covered with colourful fabrics and rugs. The nude at the centre of the work, as Pia Vivarelli observed, evokes the Venus and Cupid of 1861 by Arnold Böcklin, in its turn taken “from a dignified model of 17thcentury origin - the Venus and Cupid by Guido Reni”.⁶ Within the framework and poses of a sacra conversazione, Voilà mon rêve establishes a dialogue between tradition and the avant-garde. 

Before entering the Cerruti Collection, in all likelihood in the second half of the 1990s, the history of the work is associated with some of the most influential Italian art galleries, from the Cavallino in Venice to the Naviglio in Milan, the Marescalchi in Bologna and the Farsetti in Prato. It is generally said to have first featured in an exhibition in 1943,⁷ but this should probably be postponed to 1964, the year when it was included in a collective exhibition at the Galleria Penelope in Rome. In 1990, the painting was exhibited in Verona, in the major Savinio. Gli anni di Parigi retrospective exhibition, which made a key contribution to studies of the artist. 

Giorgina Bertolino

¹ Vivarelli 1996, in the following order, p. 49, no. 1928 10, ill.; p. 51, no. 1928 13, ill.; p. 52, no. 1928 15 and 1928 16, ill.; p. 53, no. 1928 18, ill.

² “Les chants de la mi-mort. Scènes dramatiques d’après des épisodes du ‘Risorgimento’” appeared in the August 1914 issue of Les Soirées de Paris, now in Savinio 1974, p. 12.

³ In a handwritten note, now in the Fondo Savinio at the Archivio Bonsanti del Gabinetto G.P. Viesseux in Florence, the artist recalled that “the sketches of the figures (the bald man and the yellow man) are the origin of the ‘mannequins’ of so-called Metaphysical art”.

⁴ The citation is taken from a series of Aforismi written by Savinio between late 1916 and July 1917, now in Italy 2004, pp. 61, 381, 471.

⁵ Savinio 1995, p. 163.

⁶ Verona 1990-91, p. 170.

⁷ As already observed in Pia Vivarelli’s entries on the work (Verona 1990-91, pp. 170-171 and Vivarelli 1996, p. 54), the presence of the painting at the Rome Quadriennale in 1943, suggested by the printed label on the back of the canvas, which states its provenance from the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan (which, moreover, opened in 1946), is not supported by the archives of the Roman institution. An inspection of the Registro delle spedizioni delle opere di pittura della IV Quadriennale, carried out for this publication, confirms the uncertainty of this information.