The Prayer

Felice Casorati (1883-1963) is one of the most eminent figures in the modern art movement in Italy. His artistic training began in Padua, continued in Naples and came to full maturity during the years he spent in Verona, between 1911 and 1918. His artistic activity began with a profound critical spirit that led him, before others in Italy, to encounter the European Symbolist movement and in particular the Viennese Secession. "The Prayer" of 1914 is a paradigmatic example of the suggestion triggered in Casorati by the works of Gustav Klimt. Silence and a rarefied aura envelop this figure of a woman immersed in her prayer. Here the boldly chromatic tones of pink and violet, present in different varieties in the dress of the girl in the centre of the painting and used for the flowering meadow surrounding her, contrast with the full, almost abstract blue of the sky that dominates the upper part of the painting. The Symbolist language of Gustav Klimt - whom he met at the Venice Biennale in 1910 - helped Casorati to solve one of the problems of modern painting: the relationship between two and three dimensions, and thus between vision and reality. Painted at the height of the artist's Secessionist phase, this masterpiece documents his interest in Klimt's anti-naturalistic research, in the preciousness of his colours and in forms devoid of volume but charged with spiritual and symbolic references. It is in fact in the serpentine line of the Art Nouveau style that the nature of emotion and feeling is recognised and traced. Casorati absorbed this lesson in Verona, where a phase of maturation of his artistic research took place and would be fundamental for the years to come.