Description of “Natura Morta” (1918) by Giorgio Morandi

Mysterious in its simplicity, Giorgio Morandi’s “Natura Morta” is a visual study of unreality. Employing muted earth tones and aggressively straight lines, Morandi creates an intimate portrait of abstraction, rendered in a naturalistic visual language that seems at once familiar and strange. The subjects depicted in this “still life of fantasy” suggest depth and lighting which turn out to be illusory and ultimately misleading, and we are left with an image deliberately opaque in representational or psychological meaning.

A hollow box of unknown function stares out of a shallow space, three objects suspended inside as if trapped in a fourth dimension: a sphere attached to a thin wire or rod which casts a stark shadow on the inner left corner of the open box; a cylindrical wooden object at center which resembles a post from an old stairway banister with its circular protrusions; and a flat, rectangular rod bisected vertically and suspended on the right. These objects suggest physical materials – the wooden post appears wooden because of its shape and color – but any clue of their identity and function is omitted. Surfaces are rendered flat and monotone, devoid of texture.

The lighting in “Natura Morta” – Italian for “still life” – is particularly misleading. Multiple conflicting light sources confound what appears at first to be a naturalistic setting. The low horizon and murky colors behind the hollow box, for instance, suggest a dimly lit table or shelf, but the box casts no shadow. The objects inside the box are brightly lit from an ambiguous source, as though they exist in a spatial reality separate from the box itself. Two of these objects cast sharp shadows which place them spatially, but the flat rod suspended next to them casts none.

The image is further confounded by two semi-transparent panes which break the otherwise perfectly parallel plane, standing at a 45 degree angle from the canvas. These cast ghostly shades at their edges, as if absorbing light instead of reflecting or transmitting it, and one inside the box appears to melt through the top and disappear into yet another spatial reality.

With his ambiguous and fantastical still life, Morandi presents a reality other than our own, yet resists the temptation to assign meaning to his surreal abstractions. Monumental and silent, these objects simply exist on their own terms, in a world which superficially resembles ours but does not require our spatial rules or functional interpretations.