He draws masks and actions on paper with unchanging improvisation, transforming them into eternal minor heroes of the “commedia dell’arte” on canvas. 

Born in Siena in 1898, Mino Maccari was one of the key Italian painters, draughtsmen and engravers of the 20th century. His long artistic career was characterised by his wide-ranging sources of inspiration and his keen eye as a disenchanted observer, capturing the chiaroscuro accents of daily life with a strong expressionistic charge. The humanity of his works is shown through acerbic and bitter colours, sometimes in dark tones, which allow secrets and unexpected elegance to seep out. With a penetrating eye, he depicts tormented and humble figures, leading us to reflect on the darker aspects of human life. Maccari describes his subjects’ defects, vices and reality with untarnished sensibility, with provocative and pungent accents. He draws masks and actions on paper with unchanging improvisation, transforming them into eternal minor heroes of the “commedia dell’arte” on canvas. The artist drew continually his entire life, stating “…as children, everyone draws. Then they stop. I’ve never stopped, that’s it…”.¹ 

A great colourist, experimenter with engraving techniques such as lino cuts and a prolific narrator with a sharp aesthetic perception, Maccari is remembered within the fertile panorama of Italian 20th-century culture not only for his figurative art, but also for a more varied range of interests and activities, such as publishing, journalism, art criticism, literature and cultural organisation. 

He graduated in law in 1920, at a time when he was already making his first woodcut and painting experiments. On 13 July 1924, in partnership with Angiolo Bencini, he published the first issue of Il Selvaggio at the Bardini printing press in Colle Valdelsa, featuring one of his engravings on the front page. From April 1926, Maccari took over as editor of the magazine, moving his office firstly to Florence, then to Siena and Turin, and then definitively to Rome in 1932, where he involved the first illustrious contributors such as Achille Lega and Ottone Rosai, Ardengo Soffici and Curzio Malaparte and, a few years later, Filippo de Pisis, Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi, to whom he was tied by a long and affectionate friendship.² In 1928 he participated for the first time in the 16th Venice Biennale; in 1929 he exhibited drypoint engravings in the second Mostra del Novecento Italiano in Milan, while in 1931 he was invited to the first Quadriennale in Rome, the year in which he was appointed editorin- chief of La Stampa by its new director Malaparte.  In the early 1930s, he also brought in his friend Italo Cremona to work on Il Selvaggio and, a few years later, in 1938, Cremona went on to review his exhibition at the Galleria La Zecca in Turin in glowing terms. 

Roberto Longhi noted that Maccari’s work showed “a complex, precipitate, rapacious culture, good for refreshing us after the sordid ignorance of so many beribboned cattle and draughthorses of great art”; also recognising his capacity to “clarify the view” and make us consider what is happening outside Italy.³ 

His style shows the experiences of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, the Fauvism of André Derain and the Expressionism of James Ensor and George Grosz, also with regards to his compositional choices that, albeit less rigid, have a salacious character, which cannot be associated with any particular artistic trend or movement. 

The oil on panel in the Cerruti Collection, which was probably painted in the 1950s, depicts a dishevelled and lascivious woman. It is an example of Maccari’s constant vein of ironic brazenness in which the ballad of the senses of voluptuous young women and lusty old men takes shape: “The canvas becomes the arena of a challenge”,⁴ with the textured colour and convinced style of someone who believes in the brushstroke as an instrument of narration and shrewd representation. 

Francesco Federico Cerruti appreciated these frank intentions, including Mino Maccari’s work in his collection, perhaps partly because of the highly unusual way in which the Sienese artist perceived paintings and their use: 

“…even in the restricted and intimate environment of the conversation (if it can be termed thus) between a painting and its viewer, whether the owner or a visitor, the relationship is not always the same: indeed, how often does a painting, when seen again after a certain period of time, appear different from what we remember? How many times does a painting that excited us leave us cold and vice versa? How often are we surprised by details that had escaped our notice before? The painting cannot be observed at length: there is a limit beyond which the eye grows tired and moves away. The painting should be looked at briefly and often.”⁵ 

Elena Inchingolo 

¹ Bari 1998-99, p. XXVI. 

² Having met through Leo Longanesi in 1924, Morandi and Maccari became travel companions with similar ideas and objectives, forming a partnership that ended only with the death of the Bolognese artist in June 1964. Among other things, we should recall one of the shared moments that marked their lives: participation in the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948, where they both received the top prize, Morandi for painting and Maccari for engraving. 

³ R. Longhi, in Siena 1977, p. VI. 

⁴ Montevarchi-Arezzo 2000, p. 16. 

⁵ Sasso Marconi 1976, np.