Felice Casorati 1883-1963

Born into a family of scientists, Felice Casorati spent his childhood moving according to the military postings of his father, a career officer, living successively in Milan, Reggio Emilia, Sassari and Padua. After graduating in law from the University of Padua in 1906, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting. The following year, he made his debut at the Venice Biennale, where his work quickly attracted attention.

Based in Naples between 1907 and 1910, he studied the Old Masters at the Museo di Capodimonte, particularly Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His discovery of Gustav Klimt’s work at the 1910 Biennale had a lasting influence on his aesthetic, directing it towards a refined form of Symbolism informed by the Vienna Secession.

Settling in Verona from 1911 to 1915, he founded the magazine La Via Lattea in 1914 and became associated with the circle of artists exhibiting at Ca’ Pesaro, among them Arturo Martini, Gino Rossi and Pio Semeghini. Mobilised during the First World War and profoundly affected by his father’s suicide in 1917, Casorati moved to Turin that same year, soon becoming one of the city’s most influential artistic figures.

There, he established an art school and studio that trained several generations of painters, including Carlo Levi, Francesco Menzio and Jessie Boswell. During the 1920s, his style reached full maturity: hieratic figures, silent spaces, rigorous architectural structures and suspended light came together to form a timeless world inspired as much by Piero della Francesca as by modern Metaphysical painting. These qualities established him as one of the leading representatives of Italian Magical Realism.

His work achieved international recognition through the Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadriennale and exhibitions in Zurich, Geneva, Pittsburgh and New York. At the same time, he pursued an important career as a decorator, stage designer and designer. In 1931, he married his pupil Daphne Maugham, a niece of the writer Somerset Maugham. Their son, Francesco Casorati, born in 1934, also became a painter.

Appointed professor of painting at the Accademia Albertina in Turin in 1941, Casorati became its director in 1952 and president in 1954. Until the end of his life, he remained a central figure in modern Italian art, creating a profoundly poetic body of work in which the rigour of classical construction is combined with an intense sense of inner contemplation.