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FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

arrangement, is enough to give him the material for a picture—an ensemble of tones and lights which will convey the immediate impression of truth. That is all he seeks: not sharpness of outline, not scenic grace, not pathos, not hieroglyphic mystery, not mathematical abstraction. He is a clear, sane, simple, homely painter. Look at the two paintings of the Pincian Hill (the little one with the blue sky and the flowers, and the larger one with the carriages) or the two of paths in the Villa Borghese (the lonely one, and the one with people on the benches); look particularly at the portrait of Pasqualina with the broom and the little girl turning her back and her braided hair, a painting of the utmost loving delicacy in color; or look at the other large unfinished household scene that hangs beside it—and you will understand what I mean when I speak of the Italian loyalty of Spadini. Even his color has grown clearer of late. He is successful in his greens, in his violets, and in his dainty shades of rose; he has lost the sickly museum yellow.

He has escaped the infection of all those novelties which have lately been transplanted from France to decay in Italy. In the work of pioneers such novelties have a revealing and a revolutionary value which I should be the first to acknowledge (and here in Italy the names of Soffici and of Carrà will suffice to establish the