VII.iv. Morandi

"I believe the educational task possible for the figurative arts, particularly at the present time, is to communicate the images and feelings that the visible world arouses in us."
- Giorgio Morandi

Today Tony and Gabrielle especially wanted to see the Morandi Museum, located right in the centre of Bologna. Giorgio Morandi was Bologna's most representative modernist painter, and managed to achieve fame painting nothing more than still lives of the same few objects, each work's originality being expressed in terms of balance and lighting as opposed to composition. It takes a certain patience and a good eye for subtlety to look, in his work, beyond the obvious monotony, but once this is achieved his work takes on an entirely new meaning.
    Yesterday we had been to Ravenna, to see the mosaics. Tony, a painter, was especially interested in seeing them as some of his work had involved using the technique. The next day, while I remained in Bologna to attend class, the others were to go to Bondeno, a town near Ferrara, where Gabrielle, a photographer, would soon be exhibiting some of her work in a show entitled Seno Guerriero: Images of the Amazons, the myth of the armed woman from the XVIIth century to the present day. Gabrielle's work was to be shown, it would turn out, not only in Bondeno but also in several other Italian traveling shows. Today was our last full day in Bologna, then, and so we went to the Morandi museum, where we examined the collection of several hundred paintings and a reconstruction of his original studio that he left to the city of his birth.