View of Olevano by Antonietta Raphael Mafai
View of Olevano by Antonietta Raphael Mafai
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AWA restores a work with 'gypsy soul'. In 1970, art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti completed negotiations with eclectic, Genoa-based art collector Alberto della Ragione, who wrote about gifting Florence his 241-piece collection in an open letter printed in La Nazione, calling the gesture: "a testimony of affection for Florence, tremendously wounded by the flood of 1966, as well as an act of adherence to the efforts being made to restore the city's role of living capital of the arts." The gift included a small landscape painting of the hillside town near Rome called Olveano by Antonietta Raphael Mafai (1929). Landscape painting was typical of Raphael Mafai's ouvre, particularly in her Roman period. Novelist Alberto Moravia shines a spotlight on her unique take on this genre: "It is curious that Rome, the city museum hosting hundreds of academies dedicated to defunct humanist classism, has become gypsy-like, Oriental and evanescent in the works of Raphael."
Texts adapted from Jane Fortune's article 'Ladies from Afar, for Florence' in The Florentine.
Texts adapted from Jane Fortune's article 'Ladies from Afar, for Florence' in The Florentine.
The happiness of landscape
"We are dealing with an exceptional sensitivity toward color."
A window on Antonietta Mafai at home
A friendly verbal portrait of an artist with no birthday and no native city.
The tools of the trade
The restoration of Raphael Mafai's View of Olevano was completed in 2014.