Antonio Morato (1903–1989) - Maternità

ARTIST

Antonio Morato (Este, March 17, 1903 – Padua, March 13, 1989), Italian painter. He trained in the lively Padua of the 1920s, outside the traditional academic pathways. Initially drawn to the principles of the “Novecento” movement, he stood out for his keen 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 landscapes, he combined a genuine popular spirit with an exceptional attention to form and composition.

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

Technically, as well as being a skilled easel painter who worked in media ranging from oils to pastels, 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—precious testimony to the full arc of his stylistic development—are preserved and exhibited in the civic collections of the city of Padua and are also held in prestigious private collections, confirming the importance of this original and solitary interpreter of twentieth-century Italian art.

DESCRIPTION

“Maternity,” oil on canvas, 102x82cm framed, canvas only 100x80cm, 1968, dated and signed at the left edge.

In this painting, the classic theme of family affection is transformed into a vision of intense poetry and modern sculptural form. On the right of the canvas rises the mother’s slender figure, her body bent in a pose that is at once contained and monumental, arching until her upper arm extends like a protective vault over the scene, while her other arm trails along the lower edge. The child reaches upward toward this welcoming gesture from the upper left, caught as if suspended in midair in a movement of pure vitality, with arms and one leg thrust forward in a joyful acrobatic leap. In the lower-left section, almost as if in a temporal or mirrored sequence, a second child figure rests upside down, wrapped in mottled drapery and beside a geometric wooden structure reminiscent of a cradle’s side rail; the whole scene stands out against a wall divided by a dense grid of regular panels.

The composition is founded on a remarkable balance between the figures’ dynamic thrust, arranged along an imaginary open ellipse, and the firm orthogonal structure of the tiled background, which lends the space an almost mural-like solemnity. The dense, incisive brushwork alternates square, vibrant touches in the background with long, shaping strokes that sculpt the anatomy in faceted planes. Of absolute importance is the construction and harmony of the colors, with color itself becoming architecture and generating light: the entire surface is bathed in a warm, sunlit glow, orchestrated in a symphony of golden ochres, straw yellows, and apricot tones, against which pale pinks, cyclamens, magentas, and deep purples—shaping the volumes of mother and child—stand out in refined contrast. The vibrant emerald-green and turquoise outlines bordering the bodies and reappearing in the drapery below seal the perfect coherence of the whole, creating an electrifying complementary resonance that fuses figures and space into a tonal harmony of extraordinary freshness and musicality.

Painted in 1968, the canvas belongs to the height of Antonio Morato’s mature period, which had taken shape from the late 1950s onward in a style that was increasingly intimate and meditative, and distant from passing fashions. His postwar assimilation of the great European avant-gardes—clearly recognizable in the distorting synthesis of Picasso’s influence and the expressive centrality of a palette recalling Matisse—here leads to a more spare and essential application of paint, in which color remains the key element in the sculptural construction of volume. Returning to the family scenes he held dear, with the instinctive sensibility that led him to describe artists as “animals with glasses,” capable of sensing what is in the air, Morato moves beyond all traditional descriptiveness to give us an archetypal, luminous image of the maternal bond.

CONDITION REPORT

Good overall condition. The work is intact in every respect, with vivid, clearly legible colors and brushwork. The frame is included as a courtesy.

The photograph of the painting shown in a room setting was generated using artificial intelligence and is for illustrative purposes only. Only the remaining photographs should be relied upon; they faithfully show the object and its features, both overall and in detail.

Shipped with tracking and insurance, in suitable packaging.