Scuola Romana

Scuola Romana - the Roman School, also called the Scuola di via Cavour after the street where its painters worked - was a movement within Expressionism active in Rome between 1928 and 1945, with a second phase in the mid-1950s. It arose against the polished classicism of the Novecento italiano: Antonietta Raphaël, a Lithuanian-born sculptor, and the young painters Mario Mafai and Scipione (Gino Bonichi) shared a studio on via Cavour and painted the city's outskirts, markets, churches, and portraits with feverish color and visionary, almost hallucinated intensity. Scipione died at twenty-nine in 1933, his apocalyptic temperament the movement's burning centre. Where official art looked to order and antiquity, the Scuola Romana painted Rome as sacred, decaying, and modern at once - a raw subjectivity that made it one of Italy's most distinctive contributions to interwar art.

Defining characteristics

• Vehement, saturated color laid on with visible, agitated brushwork
• Roman subjects: city outskirts, markets, church interiors, portraits
• Visionary, hallucinatory atmosphere - sacred and grotesque side by side
• Elongated, nervous figuration with strong chiaroscuro
• Thick, molten surfaces (Mafai) alongside graphic sharpness (Scipione)

Key figures

• Scipione (Gino Bonichi) (1904-1933) — Expressionist painter of visionary Roman scenes, the movement's blazing talent
• Mario Mafai (1902-1965) — Co-founder; painter of Rome's demolitions and murky, thickly worked surfaces
• Antonietta Raphaël (1895-1975) — Lithuanian-born sculptor and painter who co-founded the movement

Example works

• Il ponte degli angeli — Scipione (1930)
• Demolizioni di via dell'Imperatrice — Mario Mafai

Sources

• Scuola Romana - Wikipedia encyclopedia
• Scipione (painter) - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog