Alberto Savinio
Penelope, 1945
Ink and colored pencil on paper
24.5 x 22.5 cm
Signed lower right: Savinio | On the back (on the card) is a dedication in the upper right: To Beatrice Canestro/dearest friend, intelligent/and cultured./ Yours/ Alberto Savinio/Rome, December 1945
Provenance
Switzerland, private collection
This refined sheet belongs to the full maturity of Alberto Savinio, a central yet singular figure in twentieth-century European culture, whose activity ranged across painting, literature, music, and theatre. Together with his brother Giorgio de Chirico, he was among the leading protagonists of the Metaphysical movement. Savinio, however, developed an autonomous language marked by intellectual irony and a profoundly mythopoetic vision of the image.
The subject of Penelope belongs to the vast mythological repertoire that the artist reinterpreted with great inventive freedom. The Homeric heroine—traditionally an emblem of waiting and fidelity—appears here transformed into a hybrid creature, with the head of a pelican and the body of a woman, in accordance with the poetics of metamorphosis that characterizes many of Savinio’s works. Rather than a straightforward narration of myth, the image becomes a symbolic and psychological transfiguration, in which the figure assumes an enigmatic and almost theatrical presence.
The drawing is constructed through a dense web of ink lines that model the surfaces with a nervous and intricate mark, while colored pencil introduces measured accents—particularly in the animal’s head and in the small bouquet of flowers—providing the composition with a delicate chromatic counterpoint. The setting, suggested by a drapery and faint architectural elements, recalls a stage-like space, evoking the theatrical dimension that frequently permeates the artist’s imagination.
Dated 1945, the drawing belongs to a significant moment in the artist’s production, when the recovery of classical mythology became a privileged vehicle for a learned and ironic reflection on identity, cultural memory, and the human condition. During these years Savinio alternated painting, writing, and critical activity, consolidating a singular position within the Italian cultural landscape: that of an author capable of merging erudition, imagination, and satirical spirit in images of remarkable symbolic density.
The sheet also bears the embossed “Margherita” stamp, an element that likely indicates the work’s participation in the historic exhibition organized in 1945 at the Roman gallery of the same name. This detail represents a significant point of historical interest, placing the drawing within the context of the first artistic initiatives that took place in the Italian capital in the immediate postwar period.
The work fully testifies to Savinio’s inventive and multidisciplinary genius: an artist capable of combining erudition and fantasy, classicism and modernity, in images of powerful symbolic resonance and striking imaginative freedom.
The work will be published in the forthcoming edition of the Catalogue Raisonné of Alberto Savinio, currently in preparation at the Archivio Alberto Savinio.