Art School at the Gardens of Sallust

Return to the Italianism in art

In 1922, Felice Carena, Attilio Selva, and Orazio Amato opened an art school in Rome’s Piazza degli Orti Sallustiani.

In the summer, the school moved to Anticoli Corrado, where Carena had a studio since 1915.

This teaching activity continued for over twenty years, in keeping with the climate of the Return to order.

The Art school at the Orti Sallustiani was inaugurated with an exhibition of paintings by Felice Carena.

The school’s manifesto

The school’s manifesto speaks of a return to Italianism in art, which would be developed by Sironi many years later with mural painting.

Unfortunately, the school did not do too well financially and disbanded in 1942, despite its many good auspices.

 

The artists of the Art School at the Gardens of Sallust

Among the school’s attendees were various exponents of the Roman School:

Emanuele Cavalli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Fausto Pirandello, Onofrio Martinelli (husband of Adriana Pincherle), Luigi Montanarini, Virgilio Guzzi, and Mario Mafai.

Emanuele Cavalli

Emanuele Cavalli (Lucera, 1904 – Florence, 1981) arrived at Carena’s school in 1922, which marked his pictorial debut. Thanks to the maestro, he was admitted to the Venice Biennale in 1926. In 1927, he exhibited with Di Cocco and Capogrossi in a room at the Dinesen Hotel in Rome. After spending time in the artistic milieu of the Italiens de Paris in Paris, he was introduced to the environment of the Scuola Romana.

Luigi Montanarini

Luigi Montanari (Florence, 1906 – Rome, 1998) studied under Felice Carena and Galileo Chini in Florence.

He traveled Europe to study 19th-century and contemporary art. In Paris, he met Severini, Picasso, and Braque.

In 1933, he won the Pensionato Artistico Nazionale competition.
He is part of the Roman School, a group of artists including Mafai, Cagli, Capogrossi, Cavalli, Ziveri, and Melli. This group is known for its tonal painting, which has a singular intimism. Montanari began to gain recognition through Sindacali exhibitions and a solo show at the Galleria della Cometa. In the 1940s, his style became more romantic and expressionistic. After the war, his art became more abstract, like that of his contemporaries. He founded the artistic association Art Club with Fazzini, Prampolini, Jarema, and Guzzi.

Virgilio Guzzi

Virgilio Guzzi (1902–1978) was a painter and art critic who had his studio at Via Margutta 51a from 1935 to 1978. After traveling abroad and exhibiting in Milan and Florence, he met Luigi Montemarini, Pericle Fazzini, and Renato Guttuso in 1940. With them, he entered the Roman painting milieu during a period of great political and cultural tension: Italy was experiencing World War II and the final years of the Fascist twenty-year period. A new moral and social order was imminent, and artists were at the forefront of describing and anticipating the change. Guzzi was an exponent of the Roman School and president of the Accademia di San Luca.

Giuseppe Capogrossi

Italian painter (Rome 1900 – 1972)
Giuseppe Capogrossi arrived at the School of Art at the Orti Sallustiani in 1923: Felice Carena’s School of Nude, among the most accredited in the capital.
Between 1927, the year of his first solo exhibition, and 1931, he was often in Paris with the painter Fausto Pirandello.
Later, in Milan, he exhibited as Gruppo dei Nuovi Pittori Romani together with Corrado Cagli and Emanuele Cavalli, with whom he worked on the Manifesto del Primordialismo Plastico and participated in the Exposition dei Pittori Romani in Paris at the Jacques Bonjean Gallery (on that occasion, the critic Waldemar George coined the definition École de Rome).

After the figurative and tonal experience, from the post-World War II period he became one of the protagonists of the renewal of Roman painting. His research on sign and abstract painting established him internationally in the Italian Informal scene along with Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana.

In 1950 he exhibited his abstract works for the first time at the Galleria del Secolo, Rome, presented by Corrado Cagli.