GIULIO BARGELLINI

(Firenze, 1875 - Roma, 1936)

Preparatory study for the 1931 mosaic made for a Jesi villa.

Expertise by Prof. Francesco Parisi: "In the late 1920s, Jesi-born architect and engineer Quadrio Pirani, whose work was aimed at building housing for the Cooperative Institute for State Employees' Housing, set himself as a landmark in the evolution of the architectural language of the twentieth century, leaving to Rome one of the few pages of international standing. He restored and updated the 18th-century villa La Meridiana in Jesi, adapting it for family housing, as he has already been done with his brother's house in the nearby Falconara Marittima. Pirani was linked, by a decades-long friendship, with the artist Giulio Bargellini, so much so that when the latter died it was the engineer himself who recovered and preserved much of the material left in the studio, including the substantial epistolary, which is still preserved by the heirs. Pirani's daughter, Beatrice, also married the illustrator Ottorino Mancioli, a frequent visitor to Bargellini's atelier himself, so much so that a work by Bargellini retouched by Mancioli himself was present at the heirs. Pirani was linked by a decades-long friendship with the artist Giulio Bargellini; when the latter died it was the engineer himself who kept much of the material left in the studio, including the substantial epistolary, which is still preserved by his heirs. Pirani's daughter, Beatrice, also married the illustrator Ottorino Mancioli, a frequent visitor to Bargellini's atelier, so much so that the heirs had a work by Bargellini retouched by Mancioli himself.
The bond with Pirani and the close relationship of trust is further evidenced by a letter, attributable to the same years as the decoration of Villa La Meridiana, in which Bargellini invites his friend to look to the four compositions he was preparing for the Sacro Cuore church in Monte Mario, made between 1930 and 1934 (G. Monti, A. Rocchetti, L'opera di Quadrio Pirani dai documenti del suo archivio, in “Architettura Archivi” 1982, no. 2, pp. 61-86).

At the time of the commission for Pirani, Bargellini was coming from a long experience in large-scale decoration, as evidenced by the cycles for the headquarters of the Bank of Italy (1924), the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni (1927) and the Ministry of Grace and Justice (1929), as well as the numerous private commissions that had effectively distanced him from easel production and consequently from participation in the major national biennial and quadrennial exhibitions, in which he had nonetheless taken part (Esposizione Internazionale, Rome 1911; Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti, Rome 1904 and 1912; Venice Biennale 1905, 1924 and 1926).
By 1931 Bargellini had achieved a well-defined language, at times synthetic, but with a definite character identification in the types of the rather realistic faces and a 15th-century-inspired decorative imprint that would culminate in the works for the Chapel of San Giovanni Gualberto in Santa Prassede in Rome (1933).
The nature of the works executed between 1910 and 1930, for which a constant dialogue with architecture was inherent, reflects how much Bargellini's friendships in the artistic sphere were often reserved precisely for the architects with whom he established a relationship of trustful collaboration: his friendships, for example, with: Armando Brasini, who imposed him as decorator for the Italian Pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris and for the Monument to the Fallen and Victory in Tripoli (the building, later destroyed, was built between 1925 and 1929), but also with Ernesto Leschiutta (Santa Prassede, Rome), Antonio Barluzzi (Basilica of Gethsemane, Jerusalem), Marcello Piacentini, Florestano Di Fausto and Ugo Giovannozzi.


For the decoration of Villa La Meridiana, the dialogue between Pirani and Bargellini is evident from the latter's participation in both the design of the architectural frame, underlying the mosaic, and the sundial. The decorative stylistic features can be found in some of the artist's earlier works, as can be seen from the choice of the numbering characters, which are sufficiently approachable to those already used in the decorative apparatus of Villa Targioni Peragallo in Calenzano, created almost thirty years earlier, which, thanks to some allusions to occultism of which the artist was a careful scholar at the time, testifies to one of the rare examples of Symbolist decoration found in Italy (see Francesco Parisi, Giulio Bargellini, Klimtian reflections in the painting of an Italian Symbolist between Florence and Rome, in Klimt e l'arte italiana, edited by Beatrice Avanzi, exhibition catalog, Mart, Rovereto, March-June 2023, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2023, pp. 149-159).


A letter sent by Florestano Di Fausto to Giulio Barluzzi also reveals Giulio Bargellini's way of working, pointing out how the artist imprinted hundreds of studies “di piccoli schizzi a penna e a lapis per provare l’effetto migliore di masse”: according to this modus operandi, several drawings have recently emerged on the market, including of some details of the figures in the decoration of Villa La Meridiana (see Francesco Parisi, Giulio Bargellini, a fund of unpublished drawings, in Stampe Disegni Carte geografiche e vedute, auction no. 12, May 2013, Gonnelli Casa d'Aste, pp. 14-17).
The work under consideration is the preparatory cartoon for the mosaic decoration placed in the front façade of the building, the execution of which is, in all probability, to be ascribed to Ignazio Piergentili, with the support of the Cooperativa Mosaicisti of Venice, with whom Bargellini had already worked on the occasion of the decoration of the Bank of Italy (see Giulio Bargellini's report, Gli affreschi nella Sala del Consiglio della Banca d'Italia, Rome 1924, p. 10) and who a few years later would create the mosaics in the crypt dedicated to the Unknown Soldier at the Vittoriano (1935).


Although the work chronologically belongs to the early 1930s Bargellini seems to crystallize in it a scheme still akin to Art Nouveau fluencies, especially in the idea of the two flying figures that can be traced back to the figurative choices already made in the decoration for the Terme Tettuccio in Montecatini, executed between 1927 and 1928, particularly the scene dedicated to love with the softly embraced couple, accompanied by the typical fluttering dresses that reveal how faithful the artist was still to early twentieth-century manners despite the contributions derived from his reborn interest in the fifteenth century that can be defined as conforming to that glimpse of the twentieth century.

In a letter addressed to Ugo Ojetti, dated 1925, preserved in the archives of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (12.UA109), the artist showed himself conscious of his anachronism: “perhaps I misrepresent my time, but allow me to continue to represent it with all sincerity and forgive me and pity me if I attempt and invent nothing original and new.”