da/from

fino a/until

It is well-known that Morandi was interested in Rembrandt from the very start of his self-taught career as an engraver.
In his library there was no shortage of publications on the Dutch artist, while the collection contained at least five engravings. We have to look at Rembrandt with the eyes of Morandi to grasp the secret of their distancing closeness.

At first sight, the contacts appear to be circumscribed to his youthful phase, but that’s not exactly the way things went. If the fact that Morandi possessed a small nucleus of engravings by the artist is not so indicative, what appears more significant are the proofs of his labouring over the pages of the monograph that Münz had devoted to Rembrandt’s etchings.
When he decided to engrave, Morandi opposed to Rembrandt’s technical and descriptive opulence the extreme rarefaction of “his” nature, renouncing all complicated combination of etching, drypoint and burin to focus – after the technical experimenting of the years between 1921 and 1923 – almost exclusively on the etchings.

The point of encounter between Morandi and Rembrandt is to be found on the level of the variability of sign, the emulation of the expressive potential of the engraved line.
The Bolognese artist appears no less prodigious from a technical angle, since his free and mutable aggregations break up and recompose in an infinity of ways, more controlled or more informal, more subtle or more marked. His poverty of media and the moderate range of subjects nourish an inverted challenge.
Morandi renounces all form of “external” seduction, concentrating on the engraved sign and subjecting it to continuous metamorphoses, proving in the end to be no less able, virtuoso and effective than the Dutch master.

Born in Bologna, he would have been able to inherit the local humus by choosing the more descriptive and reassuring medium of the burin: as everyone knows it was Marcantonio who was the first, in Bologna, to bring this technique to results of the most outstanding emulative competition with nature, with the contribution of the teaching of Dürer. But Morandi instead decided to take up another road, which once again intersected with Bologna: it was here that etching was performed by Parmigianino and later by several of the most intelligent and sensitive Bolognese artists, from Annibale Carracci to Guido Reni, who succeeded in translating the silvery tones of the Pala della Peste, which Morandi favoured, into the rarefied luminosity of their etchings. However, Morandi would not have been able to sustain the formal sobriety of his images with constantly elevated results, had he not encountered the vital and triumphant richness of the engraved lines and the shifting scenography of the lights and shadows of Rembrandt.

The only time when he takes inspiration from Rembrandt in iconographical terms too, in his Conchiglia of 1921, Morandi did so emulating the only still life attributed to the Dutchman, that conus marmoreus of 1650 which, in the masterful “recreation” of the artist almost appears to change skin, migrating from the world of naturalia to that of artificialia. For Morandi it was not, however, a question of competing with nature: the artistic diaphragms of the mutant sign, like the geometrical figures of Galileo, were sufficient to enable him to pass through the Pillars of Hercules of the real, while his gaze remained fixed on the objects surrounding man.