Gino Severini

(Cortona/Arezzo 1883–1966 Paris)
Il Paradiso Terrestre, c. 1937, signed, oil and tempera on board mounted on panel, 162 x 261 cm, framed
Provenance:
Private Collection
Galleria Farsetti, Prato
Galleria Marlborough, Rome
Collezione Lizzola, Milan
Sale Christie’s Milan, 23 May 1994, lot 201
European Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

Exhibited:
Venice, XXI Biennale Internazionale d’Arte 1938, exh. cat. tav. 98, p. 91 – p. 133, with ill.
São Paulo do Brazil, 1938 (label on the reverse)
Bern, Austellung der Modernen Italienischen Kunst, Bern’s Kunsthalle, October 1938, exh. cat. p.33
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Omaggio a Severini, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Fratelli Falsetti, 1–31 August 1970, exh. cat. tav. XII, with ill.
Alessandria, Gino Severini dal 1916 al 1936, Palazzo Cuttica 25 April –14 June 1987, exh. cat. p. 98, no. 61 with ill.
Bolzano - Genova, Severini - Nord Sud Revue Litteraire, Castel Mareccio, Bolzano 15 December 1987- 31 January 1988, Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Villa Groce, Genoa 9 March-24 April 1988, exh. cat., no. 55 with ill.

Literature:
D. Fonti, Gino Severini. Catalogo ragionato, Aldo Mondadori Milano 1988, p. 437, no. 586, with ill.

Around 1937, at the very moment when he was engaged in the execution of the mosaics for the Palazzo delle Poste in Alessandria, Gino Severini transposed onto a large board his vision of the Earthly Paradise. Within an archaic, only summarily suggested landscape, dinosaurs, zebras, horses, and both exotic and domestic animals proceed side by side, filling the pictorial surface entirely, as though arranged within an ancient bas-relief. Following a boustrophedonic progression from left to right, Severini narrates the act of Creation, from the earliest volcanic eruptions that gave form to the world through to the emergence of humankind.
Devoid of volumetric substance, the figures are distributed across three parallel registers, articulating a landscape deliberately conceived beyond the principles of Euclidean space and the dictates of central linear perspective.
In this large panel in oil and tempera on board, Severini adopts the same compositional strategies employed in his mosaics, rejecting perspectival planes and reducing the composition to a deliberately flattened and synthesised vision. A profound connoisseur of the mosaic technique, one to which he devoted himself regularly from 1930 onwards (L’Assunta, Tavannes, 1930; Le arti, Triennale di Milano, 1933; Palazzo delle Poste, Alessandria, from 1936; Albero della Scienza, Università di Padova, 1938), Severini conceived his Paradiso Terrestre with reference to the great mosaic cycles of Ravenna, Rome, and Pompei, as well as to the grand Nile Mosaic of Palestrina (second–first century BC).
The panel thus stands in open continuity with Roman mosaic, from which it recovers the ancient, unified bird’s-eye vision, the descriptive rendering of fauna, and the pursuit of harmony:
“Many elegant and profound definitions, philosophical or aesthetic, may be given to art and beauty; yet for a painter they may all be summed up in a single phrase: to create harmony. (…) The work of art must be ‘eurhythmic’, that is, all its elements must combine into a whole according to a constant relationship governed by certain laws.”
(Gino Severini, Dal cubismo al classicismo, 1921)
In 1938 the panel was exhibited at the Twenty-first International Art Exhibition of Venice (Venice Biennale), in room 20 of the Italian Pavilion. In fact, Paradiso Terrestre was the only work presented by Severini at the exhibition, whose artistic direction was strongly conditioned by the political climate of the time. Yet, although the work cannot be considered stylistically immune from the cultural atmosphere of the period, it reveals less a “return to order” than a return to classicism, enabling the master to paint “Something from another world” (Umberto Eco, in Gino Severini dal 1916 al 1936, ed. M. Vescovo, exhib. cat., p. 3)