The catalogue is published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958). A recognition, however belated, of the great contribution that he made to the history of 20th-century art in Italy and one that today, through the exhibition in Venice, is bringing him to the attention of the general public. It was in 1958, the year of his death, that the artist won the National Grand Prize for Painting at the 29th Venice Biennale, where he had presented 53 works—executed between 1925 and 1958—in a personal room mounted by Carlo Scarpa.

The curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, Luca Massimo Barbero, analyzes Licini’s career and works, dividing them into four sections: “The Beginnings: between the “’Crucial’ Bologna of the 1910s and his first stay in Paris”; “The 1920s: the themes of the nude and landscape”; “Abstract Research, Licini’s ‘Enigmatic Scripts’”; “The Iconographic Inventions of His Maturity: the “amalassunte” and the ‘rebel angels’” .

Federica Pirani’s essay dwells on “Osvaldo Licini’s Metaphors of the Air: between memory and forgetting”: metaphors of the air and figures belonging to the aerial realm are a significant presence in Osvaldo Licini’s poetic imagination and painting and a constant iconographic feature in the whole of the artist’s research, from the early days to his last works. Sileno Salvagnini, in his essay “Osvaldo Licini and the Art Critics,” analyzes in depth the problems which critics have always had in categorizing him.

The catalogue concludes with an ample biography written by Chiara Mari.