He is the acclaimed and contested painter of the Belle Époque. For him, divines, aristocrats, and celebrities pose. A fashionable painter, he is more than a trend-follower - he dictates the style.
A small, ugly man, deformed, and possessed of a vicious temperament. Giovanni Boldini is arrogant, sarcastic, malicious, and indiscreet to the point of rudeness. He possesses a piercing gaze, with a hint of the predatory and the untamable, which rests constantly on others as if they were prey - as if he knew instantly what he could extract from them. The victims of this gaze would be legions of jealous husbands and lovers, and great ladies - beautiful and sophisticated - docilely ready to bend to his every whim. And not just artistic ones. He was a “gnome who envelops, astounds, and enchants,” in the evocative words of Diego Martelli. An unpredictable and sanguine man who, when the occasion called for it, could be gallant and diabolically irresistible. He controlled everything. Even to blue-blooded models, he managed to impose dresses, hairstyles, and poses bordering on contortionism. He meticulously selected precious silks and taffetas, refined laces, skin-tight dresses, and risqué slips - perhaps already imagining the moment he would tear them away with a brutal, sudden gesture, tossing them to the floor to liberate that pale, smooth flesh for the joy of the senses.
A small, ugly man, deformed, and possessed of a terrible character. He is arrogant, sarcastic, malicious, and indiscreet to the point of boorishness.
Everything about him radiated a sort of contagious, animal happiness. The tormented femme fin de siècle, discovering the scandalous origins of her anxieties through Freud and Proust, found her doctor in this painter. And through them, Boldini found more than just a biblical knowledge of the international aristocracy’s most seductive women; he found glory and fortune. Boldini lingered on the succès de scandale. He painted the lustful Marchesa Casati. He dared to imprint a touch of lasciviousness even upon the Palermitan Donna Florio, exposing the nudity of her arm, shoulder, and legs from the knee down - an image her infuriated husband would later order to be covered. He loved the theatrical flair of his favorite, Bernini. He permitted himself every luxury, even trading his riches for youth, marrying the 30-year-old Livia Cardona at the age of 87. He cared nothing for gossip; he simply wanted to spend his remaining time well. His was a life as long, intense, and adventurous as a novel. The son of the painter Antonio, Giovanni Boldini was born in 1842 in a Ferrara cloaked in a purist climate. There, his father and Pagliarini initiated him into the secrets of an art rooted in 15th-century and Gothic tastes. By twenty, he was already in Florence, officially to refine his skills at the Academy. However, he quickly rejected the dull lectures of Ussi and Pollestrini in favor of the restless Macchiaioli circle at Caffè Michelangelo.
He loves the coup de théâtre, much like his beloved Bernini. He allows himself everything - even bartering wealth for youth. At 87, he marries Livia Cardona, who is just 30
He struck up friendships with Cabianca, Fattori, Banti, and Martelli. He painted their portraits, and everyone understood that through him, an explosive and innovative personality had broken into the culture of the Macchia. His portraits of the art patron Diego Martelli or the dazzling Adelaide Banti in a white dress are canvases agitated by a singular, stinging force, moved by obsessive, swarming, rapid brushstrokes. The figures, inscribed in a decomposed space synthesized by planes, contract and expand within the unforeseen perspectives of an unnatural luminosity. Sudden, blinding snowy trajectories - ranging from greys to ochres - collaborate in this artifice, sometimes dominating the fields of color, a technique that would become a hallmark of his later works. Success followed. He expanded his social circle, frequenting the most fashionable and elegant spots in Florence. He entered the orbit of powerful foreign families in Tuscany, portraying the daughters of the Russian Laskaraki family and decorating the walls of Villa La Falconiera near Pistoia for the English Falconier family with eight tempera paintings. After a few years, the popularity he enjoyed in Florence was no longer enough.
He began long stays abroad, moving toward London. However, the rarefied Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere of the city soon bored him. He opted instead for the cosmopolitan and Impressionist Paris of the 1870s. He entered into a relationship with Goupil, the dealer of “miniatures and Chic,” as Fontanesi called him. It was a “chic” often too closely related to kitsch, at least in the works of Meissonier and Fortuny. As for Boldini, whom Goupil lavished with both laurels and money, he managed to avoid the risk of mauvais goût by drawing inspiration from entirely different sources: Gainsborough, Fragonard, Watteau, and Venetian Vedutism. The difference was palpable. His canvases - sparkling, effervescent, and airy - possessed a broader breath. By the 1880s, he radically changed his subjects. He replaced the daintiness of 18th-century marquises and duchesses with the carnal evidence of his mistresses: his housekeeper Berthe, or the Countess de Rasty. Now, divines, aristocrats, and celebrities posed for him. He became the acclaimed and sought-after painter of the Belle Époque.
In his canvases, we find an almost orgiastic violation of bold, lashing brushstrokes. They dare the non-finito like a clandestine love affair, or one consumed too quickly
He was the artist of fashion, capable of dictating it. He imposed his own ferocity through that particular and highly sensual distortion with which the possession of the woman occurs within the painting. The images vibrate with an eroticism that heightens and quivers. This translates pictorially into an almost orgiastic violation of bold, lashing brushstrokes that dare the non-finito like a clandestine love, or one consumed too quickly. His works reached staggering prices: 10,000 francs for the oil portrait of Giuseppe Verdi. Yet, his masterpiece is the pastel version, which he kept for himself because the sitter disliked it. it possesses the charm of a stolen moment: the composer seems sketched in a rush, frozen at the exact instant he appears at the studio door, his face flushed from the Parisian cold, still wearing his overcoat, white scarf, and top hat. A trip to Holland, where he discovered Frans Hals, and one to Spain with his friend Degas, where he was struck by Velázquez, reinforced his youthful inclination toward the 17th century. His paintings came alive with a new tonal freedom, essential in the sublimation of his beloved contrast between black and white. Parades of increasingly vaporous dames, fixed in elongated gestures with frantic, fast lines, alternated with expanding glimpses of Venice, acrobatic in their simultaneity of vision. Until the very end, Boldini remained pyrotechnic, with colors deployed in oblique, transversal trajectories that multiplied only to dissolve into fluid images - a pre-Futurist according to Soffici and Ragghianti. He presses on in the convulsive fascination of quivering horses, with a vivid Notturno a Montmartre, or perhaps by inviting us all to a grand Ballo alla Colonnade di Versailles.
A "gnome who envelops, astounds, and enchants," according to the vivid definition by Diego Martelli
