Tra la Biennale, Ca' Pesaro e la Secessione romana. Per un catalogo ragionato dei dipinti di Umberto Moggioli

The paper proposes to recall, through a precise historical-critical analysis of the paintings, the entire production of Umberto Moggioli, from the beginning to his roman epilogue, within a time horizon included between 1904 and 1918. The graphic and the engraving productions were not the object of cataloging; nevertheless, it was taken into account how and to what extent the design practice has influenced the development of the subject from time to time represented. To better understand the various stages that mark the artist’s pictorial journey – its growth times and changes of course, participation in Italian (and Venetian in particular) exhibitions straddle two World Wars, the network of relationships of which he was a part of – it was fundamental, from a methodological point of view, the analysis of references and exchanges of letters promoted by him, as well as the correspondence held by the widow Anna between the Twenties and the Fifties. To this end, the documentary material kept in the private archive of the Moggioli heirs, partly merged in the Documentary Appendix, was reorganized and inventoried; an instrument of support, this last, indispensable for the examination of individual works, as it has allowed to unravel biographical crux, to rethink times and modalities of execution of some paintings – making progress or recede in time the genesis – also providing valuable information to trace back to the origins. The corpus of letters, postcards and telegrams transcribed in the Appendix frequently refer to the individual sheets, precisely to guarantee a coherent philologic framing of the paintings. A section was dedicated to paintings considered controversial under the attributional profile or stylistic identification, that is, devoid of those formal and stylistic parameters that allow to recognize with confidence the painter’s hallmark. Complete the work an introductory essay dedicated to the deepening of some specific themes: from the author’s critical fortune, starting from the figures and the exposures that have followed and investigated the stylistic evolution, to the reconsideration of the training period through the comparison of the documentation found in the Historical Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and the letters written by the young artist to the family between october 1904 and june 1907. From the hypothesis of “environmental” reconstruction of the personal exhibitions set up at Ca’ Pesaro in 1909 and in 1912 (which binds the problem of being able to determine the physiognomy of the exhibited works), up to a brief reflection on style, technique and genres (landscape painting, portraiture, still life) most addressed by the artist during hid career.