[...] a “witty and completely visual spirit”, who “pursues the lighting effects and reverberations that strike the furniture, stuccowork and decorations in an ancient ballroom” in his interior.

Born into a Jewish family of Venetian origin, Mario Cavaglieri trained in Padua at the studio of the painter Giovanni Vianello, which was also frequented by Felice Casorati during the same period. After his debut at the Società Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti in Rome in 1907, Cavaglieri exhibited with a certain regularity at the annual Ca’ Pesaro exhibitions and at the Venice Biennale before moving to France in 1925. 

“Sala da ballo” nel Palazzo Albrizzi di Venezia (“Ballroom” in Palazzo Albrizzi, Venice) explores one of the painter’s favourite genres: interiors. He particularly liked painting bourgeois settings and enclosed spaces - often crowded with decorative objects - and this preference persisted throughout his career. 

Located in the San Polo district, the stately Palazzo Albrizzi houses the large room painted by Cavaglieri (originally furnished as a bedroom), which is rendered in the picture from a foreshortened angle that embraces large sections of its decorative features: in addition to the 18th-century furniture and the imposing central chandelier, the room stands out for its eye-catching ceiling decorations (with a succession of putti, playfully intent on holding up an immense drape) created by Abbondio Stazio, a stucco artist from Ticino who trained in Rome, in around 1700.  Cavaglieri did not just paint this room in the palace, but also produced some other images of the entrance hall during the same period.¹ 

Presented in 1924 at the 14th art exhibition in Venice (the year that his fellow student Casorati made a name for himself with his solo exhibition), the painting was displayed in the fourth room and immediately attracted the public’s attention.² Despite the rather cold reception in relation to his Venetian participation (in addition to the Sala da ballo, Cavaglieri also exhibited a portrait entitled Costume veneziano [Venetian Costume], seen in a negative light), the critic Pietro Torriano defines him as a “witty and completely visual spirit”, who “pursues the lighting effects and reverberations that strike the furniture, stuccowork and decorations in an ancient ballroom” in his interior.³ 

When he moved to Pavie-sur-Gers near Auch, in Gascony, in 1925, Cavaglieri took the painting with him, showing it in a number of French exhibitions. The work seemed to be particularly important to the artist during this period, as he looked back over his career. Indeed, it featured in the Salon d’Automne in 1926 - the first attestation of his prestige following his arrival in France - alongside I fidanzati (The Engaged Couple), a work crucial to the developments of the 1910s.⁴ Cavaglieri used diluted layers of paint in the Sala da ballo, often allowing us to glimpse the underlying drawing, but still building up colour - the use of texture is a recurrent feature that always characterised his work - often applied in the form of pure pigment.⁵ His use of colour (albeit attenuated here compared to his distinctive “bright” hues of the same period)⁶ was certainly inspired by the Venetian figurative tradition,⁷ brought up-to-date by French Post- Impressionist painting and European Secessionist movements. 

Formerly owned by the playwright Raymond Vincy, the work was purchased at auction by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 1999, recording the highest ever sales price achieved by a Cavaglieri painting at the time. 

Alessandro Botta 

¹ As well as the painting in an unknown location Il portego di Palazzo Albrizzi a Venezia (The Entrance Hall of Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice, 1924) (see Vareilles 2006, p. 165, no. 606), see also the work entitled Intérieur de palais italien (Interior of an Italian Palazzo), which came up for auction in 2014 (see Primardeco, Tolouse, Tableaux, objets d’art, mobilier, 28 June 2014, no. 183).

² According to the news report in Il Popolo Veneto newspaper, King Vittorio Emanuele III himself, among others, stood before the Sala da ballo during his visit to the exhibition (see La XIV Mostra d’arte 1924).

³ Torriano 1924, p. 22.

⁴ See Vareilles 2006, pp. 121-122, no. 464. The work was painted in 1918.

⁵ Once again, Torriano, regarding his technique, states: “Mario Cavaglieri favours bright, thick pastes, alternating them with lean, brief and incisive strokes” (Torriano 1924, p. 22).

⁶ The critic Ugo Nebbia, in reference to the chromatic aspects of the Sala da ballo, observes how: “The fantastic squandering of showy colours […] only partly recalls a certain over-abundant, but characteristic manner of defining rich and luminous interiors, for which this painter had been clearly distinguished for some time” (Nebbia 1924, p. 34).

⁷ Giuseppe Raimondi, expanding the horizon to the potential cultural context of reference, observes how Cavaglieri: “However strongly attached to French Post-Impressionist vegetation […] reveals his Venetian birth, an 18th-century cradled between Gozzi’s fairy tales and Longhi’s intimate scenes” (G. Raimondi, “Pitture di Mario Cavaglieri”, in Florence 1953, p. 6).