“[...] these apparently hybrid forms” were “the expression of the deepest and most sacred human character”

The subject of this work in tempera by Alberto Savinio is Penelope, one of the animal-headed figures with which he interpreted the theme of metamorphosis as from the early 1930s. The hybrid creature is part of an iconography generated by the integration of species, the emblem of a broader pictorial dimension based on conceptual and figurative fluidity between the categories of organic and inorganic, biological and mechanical, animate and inanimate. 

Penelope is born out of the combination of a pose taken from a photograph of the artist’s mother and an illustration from a book of animals belonging to his little daughter, sources already used both together and separately over the years in a range of variations.¹ The pelican head first appeared in a group of canvases painted in Paris in 1930. Grafted onto a male nude in Retour de l’Enfant Prodigue (Return of the Child Prodigy), it returned with greater frequency in female versions as from La visite (The Visit), where a shapely pelican woman and an elegant ostrich-headed lady sit together in a living room.² Shortly afterwards, they became the subjects of Le départ d’Ulysse (Ulysse’s Departure), La fidèle Epouse (The Faithful Wife) and Penelope,³ titles that evoke the mythic and symbolic dimension of waiting. The pelican woman was to reappear in the second series of panels produced by Savinio in 1931 for the Parisian home of Léonce Rosemberg after the commission of 1928, when he worked in the apartment on Rue de Longchamp alongside Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini and other artists connected with the dealer, collector and owner of the Galerie L’Effort Moderne. Savinio’s fantastic bestiary, made up of rooster, giraffe and camel men as well as bird women, oversteps the taxonomic categories established in the 18th century by Linnaeus with the Systema Naturae to develop an imaginary Darwinism shared with the Surrealists and based on biological kinship, belonging more to the sphere of dreams and obsessions than to the archetypes and metaphors of the tradition of Aesop’s fables. 

Alberto Savinio was living in Rome when he returned to his pelican creature in this work on paper in the late 1940s. On leaving Paris in 1933, he entered the Italian artistic circuit, holding numerous solo shows and taking part in various editions of the Venice Biennale (1934 and 1936) and the Rome Quadriennale (1935, 1939 and 1943). He focused less on painting during the war than on graphic art and took up the theme of his animal-headed men and women in writing, stating in Vita di Enrico Ibsen (1943) that unlike common caricatures, “these apparently hybrid forms” were “the expression of the deepest and most sacred human character”,⁴ a character manifested in a self-portrait of 1936 through the figure of an owl, the symbol of night and wisdom (fig. 1).⁵ In the short story La nostra anima, a woman with the “long bill of a pelican hanging down for half a metre from her face” becomes Psyche as depicted in one of the two lithographs contained in the book published in 1944: a kneeling female nude with her skin covered in signs and her taloned right hand in the foreground.⁶ This model looks forward to the Cerruti Penelope, where, as Pia Vivarelli writes in the general catalogue of Savinio’s work: “The irony of the animal metamorphosis of the figure of his mother, taken from a photo in the family album, gives way to monstrous deformation of the image.”⁷ The extraordinary fantastic dimension typical of the canvases of 1930 changes radically in the setting of a bourgeois interior. Savinio takes up the canons of portraiture and diverts them into a sequence of contrasts. In the landscape-room, midway between interior and exterior, day and night, the mother-Penelope, seated in profile in a Louis-Philippe style armchair, is clad in frivolous 18th-century shoes and a long dress that leaves her powerful and almost deformed male arms bare. As the artist wrote in “I nostri antenati”: “These pictures of mine are character studies or rather portraits, because a portrait - a true portrait - is the revelation of the hidden man.”⁸ 

Giorgina Bertolino 

¹ The photograph of his mother as a young woman, sitting in an armchair and holding a bunch of flowers, and the illustrations of the animal book are published and examined by Pia Vivarelli in Verona 1990-91, pp. 132 and 268, where their location is given as the Archivio Savinio in Rome.

² Vivarelli 1996, respectively p. 102, no. 1930-5 and p. 109, no. 1930-44.

³ Ibid., respectively p. 109, no. 1930-45 and p. 111, no. 1930-31 and no. 1930-31-2.

⁴ Savinio 1979, pp. 83-84.

⁵ The painting is owned by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. Vivarelli 1996, pp. 278-279.

⁶ A. Savinio, “La nostra anima” [1944], in Tinterri, Italy 1999, p. 527. The two lithographs, entitled Amore and Psiche, were included in the first edition of three hundred signed copies of La nostra anima, printed by Documento editore, Rome, for Bompiani, Milan. See Fiesole 1981, p. 161.

⁷ Vivarelli 1996, p. 354.

⁸ A. Savinio, “I nostri antenati” [1943], in Savinio 2004, p. 25.