Giovanni Boldini represented the spirit of the Belle Époque, the broad Parisian streets, the night life in the elegant cafes and trendy bars. These are the years of the large paintings, following an aesthetic parable specular to fashion and customs of society, less traditional and more open to progress.
The exhibition of Giovanni Boldini in Rome, at Complesso del Vittoriano from 4th March to 16th July 2017, is dedicated especially to women of this age. His women were always fine, feminine and emancipated, whether they were dressed or undressed. Their characteristics were enhanced by lengthening the line of the legs, hands, feet to enhance their natural charm.
Among the many divines, as he called them, there are the most important names of that society including Consuelo Vanderbilt – duchess of Marlborough, the baroness Franca Florio, the marquise Luisa Casati, the Chilean de Ossa, and others.
The divines of Giovanni Boldini
The women of Giovanni Boldini are female figures aware of the desire that they arouse to male universe, and the artist cleverly plays on the strings of their sensitivity. But he doesn’t paint only the beauty, but the awareness of their role, where the elegance charm is enhanced also from clothing.
This wome are smiling and throbbing life, portrayed in all their splendor of the worldly life and dressed elegantly in the fashion of the time. The artist free them from the cage that forced their body in crinoline and favors clothes that can enhance the figure and reveal the graces generously.
Boldini, a dynamic artist
Life is motion and Boldini was a dynamic painter. Dynamic not only because haunted by the realization of what he lives and wants to become, but also because he wanted to outdo himself.
Boldini was the painter of the gesture, of the thrill that hovers around a hand when it’s just resting and has not yet weighed in the forgetfulness of itself. In his paintings the gesture is not laying, is motion, transition. So while it express what it is, it still contains what was and expressed what he wants to become.
No one has been able to be seated people like Boldini.
