Costantino Proietto - Twentieth Century Italian Modern Impressionist
At Casa Carrie, we own a midcentury original oil painting of Italy's Amalfi Coast
hanging in my office. Southeast of Napoli and due west of Sorrento, the
Amalfi Coast is famous for the play of light between its Mediterranean
sun and sea. In the afternoon, the interplay of direct and reflected
sunlight makes the Amalfi Coast perfect for a juxtaposition of seascape
and landscape.
As
I looked around our home, I realized that we have three separate
pictures of the Amalfi Coast. The one mentioned above is the
masterpiece, with its muted gilt frame, deep textures and sublime light.
Adjacent to it is a framed print of a similar scene, painted from a
different vantage point. The third is a small, sunny oil painting with
lots of color and sailboats heeling in an afternoon breeze.
With thousands of Amalfi Coast photographs
available through Google Images, It was easy to determine that all
three of our images are true to their location, including the headlands
and coves that make up the Amalfi Coast. From different locations on the
same hill, each artist captured a coastal settlement, clinging to a
steep hillside in the middle ground. In each, far mountains come down to
the sea, ending in a cliff or in a gentler slope, depending on the
artist’s perspective.
Although
each scene is one that I would gladly place myself within, the C
Proietto masterpiece is my favorite. At almost thirty-two inches wide by
twenty-three inches high, its foreground includes the terrace of a
classical villa. On the right is a long bench, with alcoves receding
into its mortared structure. Above the stone bench is the azure blue
water of the Mediterranean Sea. Dominating the center of the picture,
and receding to the left are three great columns, two of which feature
slender grapevines. The vines ascend to an arbor, culminating in a leafy
crown. Showing a slight nicotinic haze from many years of exposure to
cigarette smoke, our masterpiece still shows us gentle gradations of
color, from the ocean to the sky. I now turn my head and view a
wonderful depiction of both home and coast.
For years, neither Carrie nor I could decipher the
signature on our masterpiece. Painted across and into the rough texture
of the painting, the artist's name looked more like machine characters
at the bottom of a bank check. It seemed that the artist did not care if
we could read his splotches of black paint. Or, because of his
anticipated fame, he expected us to know who he was. Each night, late in
his life, Pablo Picasso would sit at the same table in his favorite
cantina. When tourists, who knew he might be there stopped in and asked
for an autograph, he agreed to do so, but demanded $10,000 in cash for
signatures often scrawled on the back of a menu or on his own bill for
dinner. Soon tourist seeking an autograph from Picasso, brought
sufficient cash with them to obtain their own original Picasso.
Something tells me that most of those buyers were not disappointed with
their bargain. Pocketing ten or twenty thousand in cash each night
satisfied Papa, as well. Perhaps, CProietto expected to be known by his
signature alone.
One
recent morning, Carrie deciphered the signature on our painting. As I
awoke that morning, she said to me, "It's, CProietto”, as if I knew what
she was talking about. She had been up early, Googling his name and
quickly reaching a dead-end at the pay-for-play art database websites.
Apparently, they have not yet discovered that data wants to be free.
Perhaps they should check with Google for a new business model. With our
artist's name now known, I set out to discover (for free) more about
this "Man of Amalfi", Signore C. Proietto.
According to Google, there are two matches for the Google search, "artist+CProietto". Carlo Giuseppe Proietto is a contemporary Italian pyrographer
of note. The other Costantino Proietto was born in Italy in 1900.
According to a terse biography accompanying a German eBay listing for
one of his paintings, "He was born in Catania, Sicily, studied at the Florence Academy under Professor Fernando Cappuccio.
and lived in Italy". He is listed in the auction data bank ‘ADEC
artprice’ under ‘Proietto’.” There are no visual images of the artist
that are available on the internet, nor do we know his date or place of
death. Despite an well documented body of work, CProietto, is not, as of
this writing, included in the Wikipedia ‘List of Italian Painters’. Although most fine art catalog websites are available by subscription only, FineArtInfo.com
publicly lists three CProietto paintings sold at auction since 2005,
plus one that was unsold as of their posting date. Their prices ranged
from $100 to $487.
While
researching images of the Amalfi Coast, I came across a commercially
available poster showing the same terrace as our C Proietto original.
The biography accompanying that framed print was as follows: “Danish
artist Carl Frederik Aagaard (1833 – 1895)
was one of the most influential landscape oil painters of Copenhagen’s
Golden Age. Aagaard’s work was so revered, that he was asked to paint
King Christian IV’s chapel. Initially a student of drawing at the Danish Royal Academy, he was taught by many of the country’s renowned artists, and was strongly influenced by landscape oil painter Peter Kristian Skoovgaard.”
Aagaard’s
painting includes the same terrace as our masterpiece, but emphasizes a
field of view to the left of C Proietto’s. Costantino Proietto was born
in 1900, five years after Aagaard’s death, so their paintings of the
Amalfi Coast might differ in age by up to one hundred years. When we
merge the edge of Aagaard’s image with that of C Proietto, they blend
harmoniously. With the addition of Aagaard's view to the pergola, on the
left, two separate images morph together in one continuous scene. To
support provenance of both his art and the place, Aagaard later painted a
perspective back to the terrace, from the far end of the pergola. For
the first time we see, from that perspective, the precipice that we only
feel in C Proietto's seascape. According to Aagaard's depiction, access
to the terrace and pergola requires a walk up a long and arduous path,
all the way from sea level to the summit of this "Angel's Landing"
location. When I saw Aagaard's precipice for the first time, I felt a
touch of vertigo; as if I had just been there. The well-defined edge of
the terrace and the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea heighten the
difference in elevation between the terrace and the sea. C Proietto's
sublime terrace scene features a landscape view, while Aagaard features
landscape view towards his vanishing point.
When
a master of the nineteenth century and a master of the twentieth
century paint the same scene, from the same terrace, it raises as many
questions as it answers. Together they answer the question, “Is this
place real?” Aagaard's depiction of the place hints, but does not show
that the classical villa exists. Left unanswered are questions about C
Proietto’s knowledge of Frederik Aagaard and his earlier painting of the
same scene. Since each painter includes the columns supporting an arbor
above, we know that it is a central feature of the terrace. If one were
to review Carl Frederik Aagaard's many variations on the one depicted
here, C Proietto's scene varies in ways one would expect over a century
of use. C Proietto includes a low fence between the columns. Did someone
get too close and step off into the abyss, thus precipitation
additional safety measures?. Since the terrace existed for parts of the
past two centuries, might it still stand on that rocky precipice today?
Before Aagaard or after Proietto, how many others have hiked that
switchback path to sublime light and classical delight?
The
internet image of Aagaard’s Amalfi Coast painting is too small for us
to discern more than its overall artistry. On the far left of Aagaard's
Amalfi Coast painting, his doorway to infinity tells us that he
understood the concept of a vanishing point. Leaving these side
mysteries for another day, I did not conduct further research into
Aagaard’s other works or the prices that they fetch at auction.
Costantino Proietto, on the other hand, we know as a twentieth century
artist who combined both modern and impressionistic elements in his
Italian seascapes and other water-related scenes.
Costantino
Proietto created lasting art that graces our home and perhaps many
others around the world. The low auction prices that C Proietto oil
paintings now command reflect his relatively unknown status, rather than
the quality of his work. In my opinion, if he were better known, his
paintings would be more highly prized than the $100 - $500 indicated by
recent auction prices . Although we do not yet know his date of death,
nor do we have a picture of him, we hope that this article will
stimulate interest in both the artist and his works. Someone may read
this article, walk into his or her study as I did, only to discover that
their seascape is a C Proietto original, or maybe a Carl Frederik
Aagaard original.
In order for the world to appreciate Costantino Proietto as a great Modern Impressionist, we need more information about his art and his life. If any reader
has additional images or biographical information to share, we would be
happy to post it here. If you have knowledge that will help solve an
ongoing twentieth century art mystery, please leave a comment at the
bottom of this article or send your images via email. All information
posted will include proper attribution, in accordance with the
provider’s wishes.
By James McGillis at 01:01 AM | Fine Art | Comments (6) | Link
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