"A healthy and serene art. Hector Titus' July

In the 1894 guide to the Esposizioni Riunite in Milan, it could be read that Ettore Tito’s paintings were not capable of drawing the public’s attention d’ embl&e acute;e: “they are not large in size, nor are they of new or eccentric subject matter,” the volume sentenced. Yet, that same publication singled them out as “perhaps the most remarkable event of the entire exhibition,” because none of the other artists on display (and there were some great ones: Giuseppe Pellizza, Giovanni Segantini, Emilio Longoni, and many, many others), according to the guide, succeeded with equal simplicity in conveying the atmospheric values of plein air to the relative. And to illustrate this appearance of simplicity, the booklet presented Luglio, one of the best-known and most recognized masterpieces of the Stabiese artist by birth but Venetian by adoption: he had presented it precisely as part of the Triennale di Belle Arti in Milan, which that year had been merged with the many other exhibitions that would later give rise to the Esposizioni Riunite (and which had nothing to do with today’s Triennale: it was another exhibition).

The subject is also of disarming simplicity: under the summer heatwave, in the month of July, some people are taking a swim in the Adriatic Sea, at the Venice Lido. There are mothers with small children, young boys holding hands, a couple of lone figures further back. The water is shallow and calm, tinged with the rosy reflections of the morning sun, coloring the water on which the milky sky typical of the hottest days of summer, when mugginess obscures the clear blue with its veils of humidity. The woman in the foreground has her wet robe down to her knees, holding her children in her arms. So does the other mother farther back, arranged to close the oblique cut of a composition that has in the center the group of little boys undressed and wet up to their heads.

Ettore Tito’s brush melts in a warm, enveloping light that brings out the slight ripples of the sea, sparkling with golden reflections amid the light lapping of the waves that glide toward the shore and crash against the ankles of the characters, caught in the act of approaching the shoreline at the end of their swim. One almost seems to imagine that mother in the foreground as she goes in person to fetch the older child who does not want to know how to get out of the water: a scene that for decades has occurred every summer day along all the coasts of Italy.

Ettore Tito, July (1894; oil on canvas, 97 x 55 cm; Trissino, Villa Marzotto)

A seaside painting, in short, typical of late 19th-century taste: a subject much frequented by late Impressionism, of which Ettore Tito was one of the major Italian exponents. Scenes such as the one painted by the Venetian painter abound from the north to the south of the continent, in the works of artists such as Joaquín Sorolla, Max Liebermann, Anders Zorn, and Paul Gustave Fischer, not to mention the painters of the Skagen School, from Peder Severin Krøyer to Michael Ancher, from Karl Madsen to Viggo Johansen. Each read the sea according to his or her own temperament and sensibility, from artists who lingered on joyous and crowded beaches to others who favored more intimate and meditative scenes instead.

And Tito was a painter capable of conveying ease and happiness, evoking “so much joy, so much freshness, so much brightness, so much smiles and happiness of life,” as Luigi Giovanola had to write when reviewing in Emporium, in 1919, his solo exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan. His painting of bathing by the sea had been highly praised by contemporary critics: for Raffaello Barbiera, who had seen Luglio at the Milan Triennale in 1894 of all places, that exhibition marked the brightest point in the then 35-year-old painter’s career. “A rosy light is spread quietly across the sky, across the waves, and it envelops and imbues everything,” Barbiera wrote. “Just barely the rolling advancing sea foam whitens in a line; just barely the water of the Adriatic, coming to die on the beach, has limpid reflections of cobalt blue. In the foreground, a lithe and mature commoner, with somewhat adipose and floppy flesh, holds two children, one of whom all naked is as beautiful as an Amorino by Albani; she watches him, apparently listening to the wishes and remarks he goes murmuring to her. Other children in camisoles run through the waves and form delightful little groups: the whole picture is an idyll: the idyll of the sea.”

An idyll that Ettore Tito tackles with a photographer’s flair. Photographic is the idea of arranging the figures off-center, arranged near the bottom edge of the composition. Photographic is the close framing, and photographic is the composition set on such a sloping diagonal. Nor is this one of the most daring framing of a painter who had been able to dare even more, in his many paintings that tell of the tranquility of the Venetian lagoon, the games on the water, the calm monotony of the gondoliers’ lives, the light and the crystalline reflections of the sea. For Roberto Longhi, Ettore Tito was a “Paolo Veronese with a kodak.” In the intentions of the great art historian (who was four years old when Tito presented Luglio at the Milan Triennale), however, it was not meant to be a compliment: it was 1919 and they were discussing the possibility of entrusting Ettore Tito with the decoration of a salon in Palazzo Venezia. A very unattractive prospect according to the young Longhi, for whom Tito should have decorated neither that nor “any other hall in the world,” because the Venetian, in his opinion, did not possess “the slightest virtue of decorator and poet.” And because the yardstick of Leon Battista Alberti, to whom the design of Palazzo Venezia is attributed, would not have borne “the allegorical-apoplectic gondoliers,” the “mythical calere,” the “discolored banners” of the Venetian artist. Longhi was in good company, however: Soffici, for example, would not have admitted the genius of Ettore Tito even with a knife to his throat (his words). At most, he would have acknowledged him to be “a good photographer,” as long as he disregarded his mistakes in drawing and his inability to portray from life without letting his emotional participation be felt, and a whole sequel of flaws that the Tuscan attributed to him.

That definition of “Paolo Veronese with a kodak,” however much it was affixed to Ettore Tito in the context of pointed criticism, could nevertheless be considered a kind of merit note. As when Leroy, in order to crush the exhibition that Monet and companions had set up in Nadar’s studio in Paris in 1874, had first spoken of the “exhibition of the Impressionists.” There is no need to recall the fortune that term, which originated with derogatory intent, has had.

There is, in Ettore Tito, besides the admirable photographic technique, a fullness that recalls the works of Veronese, just as Veronesean echoes are discernible in the colorism that underlies his paintings. Some have then likened his lightness to that of Giambattista Tiepolo, others his atmospheric values to those of Francesco Guardi. Exaggerations, probably. One can agree that Ettore Tito was not a genius: the value of his art must be sought elsewhere. And it was well grasped by Ugo Ojetti, who for Tito had spoken of an art “salubrious and serene, indeed happy and mobile and immediate,” capable of ignoring pain and ugliness. An art that is populated with children, as in this July, because it wants to console, “showing that life is pleasant also because it is renewed every moment.”

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