Pisana ( English )

Lying on an elliptical sheet that circumscribes its volume, the female body appears deeply asleep: nudity places it in a timeless dimension and, at the same time, conveys a natural sensuality, enhanced by the apparent spontaneity of the pose.

The experimentation of his youth, which had reached the threshold of Futurist iconoclasm, gave way, in the first post-war period, to the recovery of form: the artist in fact adheres to the climate of the "return to order" supported by the magazine "Valori plastici" and by the Novecento group, which he frequents at Margherita Sarfatti's salon.

In the second half of the 1920s, his reflections on ancient models (Roman and Etruscan in particular) led him to create an unprecedented combination of the archaic and the modern: between 1928 and 1929, works such as the Pisana and the Drinker attest to a further turning point in his research, which enlivened the solid volumes of tradition, bringing the expressive tension of the subjects to the maximum degree.

The history of the country, from the Risorgimento to the Unification of Italy, is directly recalled by the identification of the figure with the Pisana, heroine of Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, published posthumously in 1867. The rediscovery of the historical novel was being significantly contributed to by his friends and collectors from Treviso Maria Calzavara and Natale Mazzolà, supported by Giovanni Comisso and Gino Scarpa, who hosted a circle of Ippolito Nievo readers in their house in Milan. In the same years Martini develops the idea of ​​a funerary monument dedicated to the young writer who died prematurely, which he then destroys.
The portrait of the protagonist, however, is devoid of historical and literary references: the simplicity of the figure and the setting, the smooth surface of the limbs, the silent immobility in which she is immersed, evoke instead an idea of ​​femininity and unconscious eroticism that are associated with the theme - recurrent in Martini's production - of sleeping figures (as in Donna al sole of 1930 and again Il sonno of 1933). "Women of flesh, like Pisana", he writes in Colloqui, "you feel yourself in the infinite, in certain dreams".
Shaped in clay in Rome, in the studio of Villa Strohl Fern, in 1928, the work was immediately successful: the plaster model that the artist took with him to Monza (where he taught for a year at the I.S.I.A.) was the subject of further revisitations and rethinking, also in terms of a “fragment”. The work preserved at the Bailo Museum is the first of two bronzes cast in Milan (at the Battaglia Foundry) from the plaster model, autographed by the artist in 1930. Purchased by the Mazzolà couple, it was donated to the Treviso Civic Museums in 1967.

Pisana Fase