Portrait of Carl Emilio Gadda, 1968, Restored 2016
Vivid words and pictures
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Streaks of color for Italy’s master of word-play. Carl Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) was an Italian novelist best known for turning the stiff, pre-war Italian language on its head by adding elements of dialect, technical jargon (he trained and worked as an engineer) and comic wordplay. His best-known novel, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, published in 1957, was a murder mystery that presented a vivid picture of life in early fascist Rome. A good friend of Pincherle’s during his years in Florence, he described her paintings as, ‘vivid examples of iridescent creation’. This painting is part of a series portraits of Italian writers and painters executed by Pincherle in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Restored by AWA in 2016.