Antonio Morato (1903–1989) - Maschere

ARTIST

Antonio Morato (Este, March 17, 1903 – Padua, March 13, 1989) trained in the lively Padua of the 1920s, outside the traditional academic pathways. Initially close to the aims of the “Novecento” movement, he distinguished himself through a pronounced figurative sensibility grounded in an instinctive engagement with reality. Indeed, he liked to describe artists as “animals with glasses,” capable of sensing in advance what was in the air. In his early canvases, devoted to still lifes, masks, and views, he combined a genuine popular spirit with meticulous formal and compositional care.

After the war, his artistic language evolved, absorbing Picasso’s spatial fragmentation and Matisse’s use of color, before turning, from the late 1950s onward, toward a more intimate and disenchanted body of work. Shunning passing fashions, his late period took on a more introspective tone: the landscape’s primitive, idyllic song gave way to a style of painting that expressed a palpable unease at the spread of urbanization and industrial civilization. His characteristic subjects were thus rendered with a sparser, more essential application of color, while color remained central to the construction of volume.

Technically, in addition to being a gifted easel painter, working in everything from oil to pastel, Morato was an excellent fresco painter. Among his most prestigious public works are the decorations in the “Sala delle studentesse” at Palazzo del Bo and the fresco cycles, including the “Via Crucis,” in Padua’s Church of the Holy Family (1939–1940). Today, his works, a valuable testament to the full course of his stylistic development, are preserved and showcased in the civic collections of the city of Padua and form part of prestigious private collections, confirming the importance of this original and solitary interpreter of twentieth-century Veneto.

DESCRIPTION

“Maschere” (Masks), mixed media on canvas, 80 x 100 cm, datable to the 1960s. Although the painting is unsigned, it is unquestionably by Morato, based on both comparison and provenance, as it comes from the painter’s heirs. A regular certificate of authenticity and provenance is provided.

The work brings to life an enigmatic theater of existence, suspended between the inexorable passage of time and the play of human pretenses. On the left stands a figure with an elongated neck, whose head splits into two pensive, melancholy faces, while the torso, drawn with a dense weave of dynamic lines, reaches toward the center of the scene. Here sits a female figure adorned with a necklace and earrings, her stern features rising above a curving lap, on which rests a small, rounded fruit. Behind her, a large clock face rises high, its hands close to midnight; to its right is a wide-eyed, crowned figure, resembling a playing-card king or an ancient idol, and at the far right a headless bust, like a mannequin or a checkered breastplate topped by a turned wooden rod.

The composition is held together by a tightly structured vertical arrangement, with the figures lined up in the foreground as if on a stage, while the clock face and the sphere beneath it serve as the geometric pivots around which the entire scene revolves. The artist skillfully combines rapid, nervous, continuous graphic strokes in blue-violet—which define the contours and carve out the anatomy, leaving much of the support’s light ground exposed—with fluid, liquid, almost watercolor-like brushwork. The result is an extraordinary construction and harmony of color, built around the perfect resonance of two complementary palettes: emerald and sage greens, which encircle the clock face, dot the mannequin’s checkerboard pattern on the right, and enliven the spherical elements, engage in a remarkable dialogue with warm washes of carmine red, purple, mauve, and antique pink, which envelop the left background and the center of the composition, fusing drawing and painting into a tonal score of rare lightness, transparency, and musicality.

Dating to the 1960s, the work belongs fully to Morato’s mature and more disenchanted period, which began in the late 1950s with an increasingly intimate and introspective exploration. The European influences he absorbed after the war—recognizable in the simultaneous fragmentation of profiles in the manner of Picasso and the expressive freedom of color reminiscent of Matisse—here give way to a sparse, essential application of paint, in which a few balanced areas of color suffice to create volume and space. Shunning passing fashions in order to remain true to his own solitary consistency, Morato renews the theme of masks that was dear to him and confirms his identity as that “animal with glasses,” endowed with an instinctive receptiveness and able to sense what is in the air, translating the passage of time and the enigmas of identity into a lyrical, poetic vision.

CONDITION REPORT

Good overall condition. The work is intact throughout, with vivid, clearly legible color and brushwork.

The photograph of the painting shown in a room setting was generated using artificial intelligence and should be considered purely illustrative. Only the remaining photographs are authoritative; they faithfully show the object and its features, both overall and in detail.

Tracked and insured shipping with suitable packaging.