Roberto Melli

(Ferrara 1885 – Rome 1958)

Lady in the Black Hat (Portrait of Zoe Lampronti Campagnano), c. 1913

Plaster, 37.5 x 41 x 28.5 cm

Ferrara, “Filippo de Pisis” Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art“, inv. 589

After an initial training in Ferrara, Melli moved to Genoa where he tried his hand at different materials and techniques, from engraving to modeling, under the banner of secessionist aesthetics and communion between the arts. In 1910 he landed in Rome, which became his chosen home. In the period leading up to World War I he devoted himself mainly to sculpture, developing an original language that was influenced by the climate of the emerging Futurism. Lady in the Black Hat (Portrait of Zoe Lampronti) of 1913 is a valuable testimony to the wholly personal reflection conducted by Melli on Boccioni’s plastic dynamism. The Ferrara-born artist seems primarily focused on investigating the relationships between figure and atmosphere, rather than being interested in the energy of matter in motion that was central to Futurist poetics. He therefore focuses his attention on the contrasts of light and shadow that allow him to construct the subject as a concatenation of full and empty volumes. The title of the work, with its reference to the “black hat,” declares the propensity to measure himself against color relationships and foreshadows Melli’s imminent landing in painting. All these elements indicate an affinity with the wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso and the painting of Paul Cézanne.

The sculpture depicts the Florentine poetess Zoe Campagnano Lampronti. A bronze version of this subject is known, exhibited at the II International Secession Art Exhibition, a plaster cast published in 1918 in “Valori Plastici,” a magazine founded by Melli together with Mario Broglio. In 1960 the artist’s widow, Anna Meotti Melli, donated the plaster cast along with two other portraits to the City of Ferrara.