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Tommaso di Stefano Lunetti and Christian Schad at a walkable distance? Only at the TEFAF 2014, until 23 March

 

One of the most beautiful opportunities an art fair such as the TEFAF 2014 offers to its visitors is that of having extraordinary masterpieces at a walkable distance between each other. Sometime this proximity takes place for the first and very often only time. Nevertheless, a fair is not organized as a show thereby not reflecting the idea of a certain curator. Eventually the visitor is asked to follow his own path, just as we did, driven by intuition.

 

From a biographical point of view, the two works don’t seem to have many common elements, besides being both of them somehow linked to Italy. This is where Tommaso di Stefano Lunetti comes from, while in Italy Christian Schad got married to Marcella Arcangeli, and produced his first New Objectivity pictures in 1923 in his Naples studio. It is however aesthetic-wise that the most interesting connections between the two pieces emerge.

 

The atmosphere that characterizes both of the paintings is the effect of a composition driven by some precise geometric elements. While Lunetti organizes the picture with orthogonal lines and prefers to focus on the left side of the space, four hundred years later Schad works with a big persepctive X. The vanishing point is of course the neckline’s vertex of the woman’s soft dress – a softer one if compared to the dress the Renaissance girl is wearing. Despite the frontal pose, also Schad’s subject tends toward the left side of the canvas, leaving the space on the right side for a mysterious white building with a  half opened window on the first floor. In the Lunetti’s painting a similar hint of mystery is given by the vase the girl is opening, or closing for that matter.

 

Moreover, both of the painters pay specific attention to the hair. The girl has long and wavy hair, parted at the centre of her wide forehead. Some hair is reflecting glimpses of light and, along with the thin golden halo, evoke her superhuman nature. On the opposite side, Anna Gabbioneta has a rigorous hairstyle that mirrors the smoothness of her vest. The two perfectly symmetrical earrings remind to musical notes of an ideal score. Effectively she is not a superhuman presence, and the background behind her is a real city. Nevertheless, a music is coming from the opened window… a music she is playing in her mind and that the painter seems to know well.

July 18, 2015