Monica Vitti, three paintings from her collection up for auction

Enigmatic muse of Michelangelo Antonioni, queen of Italian comedy, Monica Vitti was also an all-round intellectual who, in addition to books and travel, loved art. An echo of this last passion of the actress, who passed away in February 2022, arrives in the next auction of Modern and Contemporary Art of Finarte, scheduled in Milan on July 2: among the works on sale are three masterpieces, two canvases by De Chirico and a tempera by Balla, from Monica Vitti's personal collection. The most important work, among those previewed in Rome, is Bagni misteriosi by Giorgio de Chirico, oil on canvas from 1935 (69.7 x 49.7 cm). The painting is a pictorial transposition of the Mysterious Guest, one of the ten lithographs made by de Chirico in 1934 for the volume Mythologie by Jean Cocteau. "It belongs to De Chirico's metaphysical period - explains Fabio Benzi, art historian and academic - in which he was inspired by childhood memories, in this case the baths he took in Volos in Greece where the cabins on stilts are identical to those in the painting. At the same time, the objects are portrayed as if the gaze were that of a man who has just landed on earth" and therefore mysterious, unusual, while the subject who enters the cabin is a self-portrait of the artist himself, an element that adds further value to the work. By the same author is Niobe, tempera on canvas from 1921 (53 x 42 cm), created during the painter's Florentine period, when he was a regular visitor to the Uffizi Gallery. The interest in classical antiquity, in particular in the Roman sculptural group of the Niobids, clearly emerges in the painting, which was exhibited in the same year at the artist's solo exhibition at the Galleria Arte in Milan. This painting is linked to a personal memory of Benzi who chose it in 1993 for an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni where De Chirico was also shown as a protagonist of the "return to order" movement aimed at creating works that expressed a rediscovered figurative dimension. "It could have been 1998 or 1999 and I found myself having lunch in Fregene with Monica Vitti, a wonderful and extraordinary woman who was still very lively at the time: when I asked her about the De Chirico paintings that I knew she owned she seemed confused. She said that there had been a fire in the house and she didn't know if the paintings had been destroyed, perhaps they were the first signs of his illness". Completing the nucleus from the actress's collection is the tempera on paper Iridescent Compenetration - study for Penetration + space, dated 1912, signed by Giacomo Balla. The work, small in size (19 x 26.5 cm), bears a graphite study of the same name on the back and is estimated between 65,000 and 80,000 euros. The works from the actress's collection will be offered in an auction of around 150 lots to be held at Finarte's Milan headquarters. The sale will include works of great importance, including Alberto Burri's first painting, Texas, 1945, executed during his internment in the Hereford concentration camp in Texas, where Burri went from being a doctor to a painter. As he recounted in a famous interview in 1994: "I painted all day, it was a way of not thinking about everything around me and the war. I did nothing but paint until the liberation. And during those years I understood that I 'had to' be a painter". Furthermore, from the collection of Lella and Fausto Bertinotti stand out two serigraphs by Andy Warhol from the series dedicated to Mao Tse Tung in 1972, valued at €20/30 thousand each; several works by Piero Dorazio, donated by the Umbrian artist to the couple on the occasion of various anniversaries; a large polychrome ceramic sculpture by Giosetta Fioroni and an oil on canvas by Titina Maselli, Camion, from 1976.