Giacomo Balla, Landscape of Villa Borghese

In 1904, Giacomo Balla moved to a monastery on the corner of Via Paisiello and Via Nicolò Porpora in Rome, on the northeast edge of the park of Villa Borghese.

From the door of his house and from the windows of his home studio balcony, the painter observed and painted what he saw. Until 1910, the year in which he produced the splendid work Landscape of Villa Borghese, the theme of nature on the outskirts of the city became for Balla what the Montagne Sainte Victoire was for Paul Cézanne: a subject to be studied, examined in every detail, and then stripped down to abstraction.

This work is one of Balla's first paintings, not yet Futuristic. Here we see the artist's desire to portray nature from life with thin brushstrokes, with dark layers, with transparencies of light that blur the contours of shapes and give the painting an incredibly energetic aura.

Balla pays homage to the visual languages of Impressionism and portraits en plein air, and, looking forward, gives us his view of the park of Villa Borghese; the swallows, the sky, and the trees immersed in a multiform and multicoloured green.

Giacomo Balla
(Turin 1871 - Rome 1958)

Landscape of Villa Borghese, 1910
Oil on canvas paper, 47 x 67,5 cm
Signed and dated bottom right: Balla

On the back, handwritten inscription: Villa Borghese / Balla 1910

Provenance
private collection, Milano