ALBERTO ZIVERIRome, 1908 - 1990 Roofs of Rome, 1939 Oil on canvas, 37 x 65 cm Signed and dated lower right: A. Ziveri, 1939Label on the back of IV Quadirennale d’Arte Nazionale, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1943 (partial)LITERATURE AND EXHIBITED: “I Maestri della Scuola Romana”, a cura di A. Statuti, Florence, 2014, p. 31.BIOGRAPHY: Between 1921 and 1929 he attended the Liceo Artistico and the San Giacomo evening school of ornamental arts, where he studied with Antonino Calcagnadoro. He also experiments with sculpture which he needs to understand the sense of volume and light. He learned his trade in the workshop of the liberty fresco painter Giulio Bargellini. Here he became friends with Guglielmo Janni, a painter of great and refined culture (he is the great-grandson of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli), who encouraged him on the path of painting. In 1928 Janni gave him a copy of the volume written by Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (1927), whose art soon became the very essence of his tonal painting. Also in 1928 he made his debut with drawings at the XCIV Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Cultors of Fine Arts. At this time his style was already solid and essential in the compositional system (Self-portrait, 1929, Portrait of his brother with mannequin, 1927, Via Margutta, 1929). If anything, there remains a certain impressionism due to a passion for Antonio Mancini and an attention to the spatial and chromatic dynamism of Ferruccio Ferrazzi. Between 1928 and 1930 he repeatedly stayed in the surroundings of Parma (the city of origin of his paternal family), where he studied Andrea Mantegna, Parmigianino and Correggio, and in Milan to carry out his military service in the Bersaglieri corps. In 1931, attending the Libera del Nudo school, he met the young sculptor from the Marche region Pericle Fazzini, who became his best friend: together they rented a studio. At the beginning of the Thirties he was part of the new artistic generation that, with Corrado Cagli, Renato Guttuso, Pericle Fazzini, Afro and Mirko Basaldella, gravitated around the Dario Sabatello Gallery. The young gallerist relies heavily on him: he organizes his first solo show in 1933, in which he receives some critical success and in 1935 he inserts him in the "Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Painting" which, traveling in the United States, includes artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Giorgio Morandi and Mario Sironi. From this moment he takes part in all the most important exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 1933 he created a mural painting in an interior of the "Country House for a man of study", made by some Roman architects, including Luigi Moretti, for the V Triennale di Milano. In October 1933 "Quadrante" publishes four drawings of him. His works from the early thirties show an "aspiration to myth", which transfigures and suspends the reality of the subjects. His research is technically translated into large chromatic layers, which radiate light from the interior and are juxtaposed in shades of pink, green, purple, red and blue. The material is thus deeply vibrating and the spaces appear fluid and mellow. The figures are stylized and elongated in elegant and sensual antipsychological and timeless poses. In 1935 at the II Quadrennial of National Art in Rome he exhibited alongside the programmers of "tonalism": Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli, while the critics noted him among the revelations of the exhibition. The culmination of his tonal season is the solo show in 1936 in the Galleria della Cometa, founded in Rome by Anna Laetitia Pecci Blunt, one of his collectors. In 1937 and 1938 he was in Holland, France, Belgium and Switzerland where he examined the paintings of Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer and observed other realities. His realist debut took place at the 21st Venice Biennale in 1938, which helped to open a new stylistic phase within the Roman school. From now on, as the artist himself declares in his writings, realism is his "moral". Torment, violence and loneliness shine through in cruelly everyday images. Thus were born the intense Self-portraits, portraits of soldiers, meat markets, religious processions, timeless waiting in brothels, embraces experienced as a struggle, fights. The new freedom acquired leads him to a lightness and richness of brush, which with green shadows, in the manner of Rembrandt or black like those of Goya, discovers the psychologism of faces, the luminous and sensual nakedness of flesh. In 1943 he won the third prize for painting at the IV Quadriennale in Rome with one of his masterpieces, Judith and Holofernes and is also called to arms. In 1946 at the Galleria di Roma he held his first solo show with the new production, which includes works such as Danae, 1943, Self-portrait, 1943, Trumpeter (Bersagliere), 1946, Predica, 1944, Composition (Postribolo), 1945, Piazza Navona, 1941. He also presents a large group of etchings, a technique he has been cultivating since 1926, but which since Rembrandt's discovery has taken on a completely different expressive potential. In 1952 the publisher Luigi De Luca dedicated the first monograph to him, with an essay by Leonardo Sinisgalli. In full blast between "formalists" and "realists" he takes the side of the latter. In 1956 at the XXVIII Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Longhi defines him as the greatest living Italian realist, reconfirming this historical consecration in the presentation to the personal exhibition in 1964, which he sets up in Rome in the Galleria La Nuova Pesa. Almost all of the works made between 1957 and 1964 present a new realist phase in which the conflict between "romantic" and "classic" appears to be calmed and resolved, as demonstrated by Mattutino (about 1960). In 1983 D. Durbè, M. Fagiolo and V. Rivosecchi collected his etchings in one volume. The same critics in 1984 at the National Gallery of Modern Art curated an anthology on his painting, while in 1989 Ziveri won the Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize.BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Fagiolo, "Alberto Ziveri", Turin 1988, with previous bibliography;"Roman School in Turin 1986-1989", edited by M. Fagiolo and G. Audoli, Turin 1989;M. Fagiolo, F. Morelli, "Ziveri", exhibition catalog, Florence 1989;V. Rivosecchi, "Alberto Ziveri. Travel notebooks", Rome 1990;V. Rivosecchi, "Piero della Francesca and the twentieth century", catalog of the exhibition, edited by M.M. Lamberti and M. Fagiolo, Venice 1991, pp. 174-177;"Rome under the stars", exhibition catalog. Visual arts section by N. Vespignani, M. Fagiolo, V. Rivosecchi, collaboration with I. Montesi, Rome 1994;General catalog of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, edited by G. Bonasegale, Rome 1995.Credits: Netta Vespignani, Francesca F.R. Morelli, Valerio Rivosecchi Good condition Frame, without glass