The Roman School
The Roman School did not represent a single artistic current, but rather identified a common conception of what a work of art was. The conception was held by those artists and writers (mostly from Rome or who took up residence there) who rejected the rhetorical vision of the Novecento movement founded in Milan by Margherita Sarfatti and who embraced contemporary ideals and manners of representation. However, their production differed: there was the purism of Donghi, Trombadori and Francalancia, who worked within the current of the ‘Return to Order’ after World War I and avantgardism that typified the decade 1910–20, the expressionism of Mafai and Scipione, whose research was for vibrant signs and vivid luminosity (often, in Scipione’s case, with emphasis on the Neo-Baroque), the tonalism of Cagli, Cavalli and Capogrossi (and Mafai in the 1930s), the strong realism of Ziveri, Pirandello and the early Guttuso, and the technical experimentation and symbolism/metaphysics of Ferruccio Ferrazzi.
The background was therefore extremely varied and marked by different experiences, all of which however derived from the desire for a new realism. It is also important to emphasise the close relationship painters had with sculptors, literati and poets, who were often the most acute critics of painted works. Such writers as Libero De Libero, who ran the gallery La cometa, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alfonso Gatto, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Romeo Lucchese, and later Emilio Villa and Cesare Vivaldi, understood what was happening in the art world and supported those artists they considered most innovative. In addition there were professional art critics, like Lionello Venturi and Argan, who later considered commentary on contemporary art an essential aspect of the art historian’s role.
Another important aspect of those years was the renewal that took place in sculpture, which also occurred with notable differences between the sculptors themselves but who the shared the desire to escape rhetoric and monumentalism. Mirko, Leoncillo, Mazzacurati, Fazzini and Antonietta Raphaël fully represented this attempt to break away, both in the techniques they used and subjects they portrayed. Their works were very often marked strongly by expressionism or, in portraiture, by the search for a more effective form of realism. It was, therefore, an anti-celebrative and anti-academic form of sculpture.