Giovanni Costantini, the young man before the real thing: the 19-year-old artist's unpublished self-portrait

In the silence of a late 19th-century Roman studio, a young artist portrays himself while looking at some works on paper. Behind him, on the wall, are hanging paintings. On the table are the working tools: the papers, the brushes, the jars with colors. He is dressed smartly, in a taupe suit, a white shirt and a black tie, wearing a black hat, and he turns his gaze to the viewer holding his forehead with his hand, a sign that he was focused on his work, and he was distracted for a moment to look in front of him. The artist portraying himself is Giovanni Costantini (Rome, 1872 - 1947), an interesting Roman artist who had a successful career in the early twentieth century, and the painting depicting him is an unpublished one, belonging to the Antonacci Lapiccirella Gallery, exhibited for the first time at the exhibition Nello specchio di Narciso. The Artist’s Portrait. The face, the mask, the selfie, curated by Cristina Acidini, Gianfranco Brunelli, Fernando Mazzocca, Francesco Parisi and Paola Refice (in Forlì, Museo Civico San Domenico, from Feb. 23 to June 29, 2025).

The artist depicts himself with measured gesture and attentive gaze. There is no pose, no vanity, there is only the concentration, fine and discreet, of an artist observing himself for the first time with the awareness that that gaze serves not so much to represent a face as to define a direction. The unpublished painting The Artist in His Studio, made when Costantini was still at the beginning of his journey (he was just nineteen years old: in fact, the work is dated 1891) appears today as a particularly revealing image, the hidden snapshot of a founding moment: the one in which painting ceases to be a mere exercise of craft and becomes an inner gesture, language, identity.

Costantini’s painting, which has never been exhibited to the public, is a rare document of the youthful phase of an artist best known for his membership in the XXV group of Campagna Romana and for the painting cycle The Tears of War. But already in this first self-portrait one can grasp Costantini’s distinctive trait: attention to truth, interest in the psychology of the subjects, and the desire to recount reality without any sweetening or rhetorical filters. Far from any narcissism, the artist chooses to depict himself in the midst of daily activity, sitting at his work table, intent on observing some of his works. The atelier is not a neutral background: it is an integral part of the composition. The large desk, the jar of brushes, the walls covered with sketches and paintings, build a concrete and lived space. It is the theater of creative intimacy, a place where the artist’s solitude becomes rigor and method.

Costantini, born in 1872, is in those years immersed in rigorous training. In Rome he learned the rudiments of set design from specialist Alessandro Bazzani, but found his pictorial vocation under the guidance of Gioacchino Paglieri. He also attended the prestigious School of the Nude of the French Academy, a place of synthesis between academic rigor and modern suggestions. It was in this crossroads of influences that he matured his first language, still close to impressionism and realism, but already autonomous. The artist in his atelier is proof of this. If the diffuse light and compositional freedom hark back to the teachings of the French, the meditative atmosphere, sobriety, and control of emotional tone speak of a personal vision, inclined to essentiality. “The composition, with an interesting horizontal cut,” writes scholar Agnese Sferrazza, “allows the artist to portray himself at the work table, intent on observing some works, allowing him to highlight the furnishings of the atelier, occupied by the large desk with the jar of brushes, the walls occupied by sketches and paintings. Despite the author’s young age, the painting, in its psychological introspection and the completeness of its compositional construction, reveals the undoubted technical abilities of Costantini, who in these years is still affected by obvious suggestions of Impressionist and Realist derivation, anticipating the later maturation of his language that will lead him to move toward landscape painting.”

In this sense, the comparison with the modern self-portrait is inevitable. The late nineteenth century is a period when self-representation changes radically. Painters stop showing themselves as demiurges or heroes and begin to investigate their own existential condition, often through unadorned and reflective images. Painters stop showing themselves as demiurges or heroes and begin to investigate their own existential condition, often through unadorned and reflective images. The never-before-tried settings and unusual contexts, the abandonment of official poses, and the abandonment of all celebratory intent “allow the artists,” scholar Stefano Bosi has written, “to elaborate an original pictorial conception, capable of fitting into the complex and contradictory intensity of life. All this is also reflected in their way of representing themselves and expressing their feelings.” Bosi gives the example of Edgar Degas, who is among the first to break with convention and portray himself as an ordinary, often bourgeois, sometimes restless man. One of his best-known photographs, a carte-de-visite that recalls theSelf-Portrait of 1863, shows him in elegant clothes, but with a collected attitude, far from the theatricality of classical models. The image is no longer a mirror of pride, but of doubt.

Costantini fits into this line. His choice to portray himself inside the atelier, in an operative attitude, not as a distant, distant author, almost cloaked in a divine aura, but more like a craftsman in his workshop, speaks of a humble yet modern conception of painting. There is no “rightness of poses,” Baudelaire would have said, always echoed by Bosi, but only the man at work, caught in the moment when art coincides with concentration, with patience, with attention to detail. The work, then, is not only self-portrait, but also manifesto: already at this early stage, the painter declares his adherence to a truthful, anti-rhetorical painting practice, capable of recounting reality “as it is,” in its silences, in its fragilities, in its poignant normality.

This conception of reality would be confirmed the following year, when Costantini took part in his first public exhibition, presenting three views from life at the Mostra degli Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti. Painting en plein air, far from the artifices of the studio, represents for him a way to approach nature without filters. It is the prelude to joining, in 1904, the group of the XXV of the Roman Campagna, a hothouse of talents who favor the immediacy of direct observation, the intensity of the landscape caught in the moment. In that context, Costantini was nicknamed “Grillo,” because of his thin and nervous build, as if to confirm his restless, tireless temperament, always on the move.

In later years his painting evolves, becoming more self-conscious, but never mannered. The initial naturalism gives way to a form of symbolic realism, capable of recounting the world not only as it appears, but also as it is experienced inwardly. It was with this spirit that between 1915 and 1921 Costantini produced his masterpiece: the cycle The Tears of War. More than forty canvases, inspired by the drama of World War I, in which the artist recounts pain, loss, and destruction. There are no triumphs, no patriotic rhetoric. Each painting is a page of wounded humanity. The figures are ordinary men and women, caught in the gestures of fear, hope, resignation. The style blends the precision of the real with a symbolic tension, which takes the viewer beyond the visible, into the emotional folds of experience.

In light of this path, the self-portrait of 1891 appears as the starting point of an entire worldview. The young man portraying himself in his studio is already the man who, years later, will be able to recount the war with pity and lucidity. The consistency of his gaze is surprising: from the beginning, Costantini rejects decorativism, self-celebration, and academicism. He prefers concrete reality, the living body of things, the silent tension of places. The atelier, in this case, is not simply a work space, but a projection of an identity: it is there that the artist’s vocation is composed, not as a superior mission, but as a daily, humble, necessary practice.

The painting, now finally revealed, is a key to interpretation, a historical and poetic document. It tells the origin of a look, the exact moment when an artist decides not to imitate, but to be. Costantini rejects the worldly poses of many of his colleagues, such as Boldini, Sargent or De Nittis, and opts instead for the essential, for the truth of his craft, for the industrious silence of his atelier.

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