These bottles [...] became fundamental spatial reference points within the painting.

“Who said that Morandi repeats himself? That his paintings are all the same? You blind people, rinse out your eyes! There is more imagination in those bottles and landscapes than perhaps in all the rest of contemporary Italian painting put together.”¹ Renato Guttuso’s reaction to the paintings from the collection of Carlo Cardazzo, exhibited in Rome in spring 1941, is a worthy introduction to the five canvases by Giorgio Morandi in the Cerruti Collection. Morandi was an artist who was often accused of being monotonous. During the twenty-year period spanned by these works, he experimented with an almost disconcerting variety of pictorial styles in a thematic yet stylistic manner. In terms of his execution, Morandi varies from the noticeably chiaroscuro technique, rich in tonal variations, of the Natura morta of 1945, all the way through to the matt surfaces of the piece from 1951, achieved with dense, overlapping brushstrokes. As regards the visual impact (particularly the relationship between the position of the objects in space and the decorative motif of their forms that emerges on the surface), the violent, synthetic marquetry of the Paesaggio of 1939 seems the exact opposite of the soft and luminous modulation, reminiscent of Piero della Francesca, in the Natura morta of 1958. Those who look at these five canvases alongside one another today have to admit that there is no “Morandi style”. The only link forged between them is the tension that is constantly created in the relationship between the architecture of the vision and the colour, which is always called upon to contradict this architecture. The best prepared viewers would recognise the heart of Morandi’s painterly research and his greatness in this tension. In 1939, Cesare Brandi realised that tension imposed itself in the “hot fusion” between “perspectival spatial construction and chromatic construction”, while colour always introduced a “sudden dissolving attack upon the object”.² 

The Natura morta with the four bottles in the centre (two white ones in the foreground, two dark ones in the background), the copper jug and the metal box of tea placed at an angle, can be assigned to the Morandian phase of more decisive volumetric and spatial synthesis during the 1950s. From 1951 onwards, Morandi reintroduced the long narrow bottles into his still lifes that he had started painting in 1929 and that, coloured white (usually for the purpose of preventing disturbance by light reflections), became a constant presence from 1932 onwards. These bottles were designed to give a vertical thrust on the still life, animating it with a strong graphic effect, with profiles standing out against the empty background. They became fundamental spatial reference points within the painting and, according to a perceptive architectural interpretation by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Morandi used them “as antefixes, predominantly to mark out the arrivals of a slightly radiating composition, rotated against the background […] with an opening that commences like a breath.”³ 

The painting was exhibited in the Antologia di maestri room at the 1952 Venice Biennale, which was one of the rare opportunities in post-war Italy to see Morandi’s work in an institutional exhibition. The catalogue stated that it belonged to a generic private Venetian collection. It has not been possible to establish when it entered the Cerruti Collection.⁴ 

Flavio Fergonzi

¹Guttuso 1941, then in Guttuso 2013, p. 181.

²Brandi 1939, p. 250.

³Ragghianti 1982, p. 249.

⁴The work is mentioned in the handwritten “Inventario...” of 30 June 1993, recorded in the “vestibule and stairwell” (Cerruti Collection Archives).