Vittorio Cadel: dai nudi accademici ai bozzetti per il fregio dell’Altare della Patria

Abstract

Vittorio Cadel was born in Fanna of Pordenone in 1884 and from 1903 to 1910 had a strong academic background in Venice, Florence and Rome. Artist gifted of multiform talent in dealing with different themes and experiment a variety of graphic and painting techniques, Vittorio Cadel was a painter from the soul decadent, who showed the alternation of its existential movements in both painting and poetry, his other great passion. After the conclusion of his training, Vittorio Cadel himself approached the neomichelangiolismo the early twentieth century, as evidenced by the style with which he realized the sketches for the mosaic frieze of the portico of the Vittoriano in Rome, at which participated in competition in 1912. At the Museum of Modern Art in Udine there is preserved a large part of his graphic and pictorial, including sketches of Roman competition, through which it was possible to reconstruct not only the progressive apprenticeship training, but also the evolution of his personal style. From a detailed anatomical investigation of the human figure, according to the dictates academics, Cadel comes at one tension expressive exasperated, a language very close to that of Giulio Aristide Sartorio, his teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In this paper we wanted to investigate this stylistic aspect of the young painter of Friuli, whose promising career was tragically cut short, unfortunately, in 1917 during the First World War. The sketches for the Altar of the Nation are in fact the last and only large-scale production of Victor Cadel, where you can discover an artist of great stature, a lover of plasticity derived from Michelangelo, filtered by famous masters such as Rodin, De Carolis and Sartorio. By analyzing these works, and their possible references, we find a young painter attentive and took to his predecessors and teachers, but never a pure citationist. These sketches are therefore a tangible demonstration of a personal vision and pictorial survey, the beginning of a road that Victor Cadel would have undertaken in the wake of the last successors of Italian symbolism.