21 FANCIULLA - EN

21. Fanciulla  ca. 1960, tempera on paper, 41 x 34 cm

Undated, but perhaps dating back to the early 1960s, this vertical painting once again demonstrates Catarsini’s predilection for the female figure. The work presents a dark-haired girl, lying on her right side with her head turned to the left, offering a view of her profile. The rest of her body extends diagonally downwards to the right, occupying the central part of the painting. The young woman wears a white tank top and her bare left arm rests on a pillow. A long skirt leaves her foot uncovered. There is no defined support surface, but a background where the girl rests delicately, expressing an enchanting innocence. In her collected sleep, she appears fragile and defenseless, wrapped in her white dress that stands out against the background created by brushstrokes of light gray and yellow.

Insights

In Catarsini’s vast production, the female figure occupies a central role, declined in multiple representations: bathers and models, commoners and washerwomen, seamstresses and workers, sometimes alienated and enclosed in their pain, aggressive or dazed, robot women or real women, generous Viareggio women, with an anarchic and mysterious heart, heroines or victims of the male world. In each of his works dedicated to these subjects, a respectful gaze towards the woman constantly emerges, who in this painting rests delicately on the sleeping girl.

For this reason, as well as for its delicacy, the painting was chosen for the poster of the exhibition “L’universo femminile” which was held in Lodi in the former church of the Angel in 2001. Catarsini was very attached to Lodi, “of which he knew the coolness of the banks and the silence of the Adda, to the point of loving it almost as much as his Versilia”. He stayed in the Lombard city for long periods, between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, as a guest of his niece Elena. In October 1989, in recognition of a life spent in art, the city awarded him the gold medal of the VIII Arvini Prize, as part of the “Oldrado Da Ponte” painting exhibition. The now elderly painter, in fact, had a special relationship with this city and with the Adda, which was among his sources of pictorial and poetic inspiration. “During his bicycle rides in Lodi and along the river, he found in renewed forms those emotions that he had felt in his youth and that he continued to feel in the docks and along the canals between Viareggio and Lake Massaciuccoli”, as Dino Carlesi writes.