Like Vessels: Giorgio Morandi and the porticoes of Bologna

A lecture presented at the Modern Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University, as part of the FLOW Conference 2011.

The lecture is part of a larger mixed media project ‘Like Vessels’ (2011 – ongoing) exploring ideas around abstraction and interiority, and taking the architecture of Bologna as a starting and reference point.

Abstract:

An interior/exterior duality is implicit in any discussion of Giorgio Morandi’s work. On the one hand, a collection of domestic objects was the artist’s primary source of subject-matter for most of his career, during which time he worked, from 1910 to 1964, in an apartment on Bologna’s Via Fondazza, in a small studio bedroom facing onto a rear courtyard. Morandi’s images of bottles, vases and containers, however, were architectonic ‘constructions’ as much as still-life studies – their umber volumes and tower-like forms suffused with the atmosphere of the city. But Morandi’s work has never been discussed, in English, with specific and detailed reference to the architectural feature so unique to Bologna: the 37 km matrix of colonnaded streets, or portici, that likewise participate in a very particular and striking dialogue between interior space and exterior urban fabric. In disrupting the usual division of private and public, the portici set up a quasi-theatrical space between, reconfiguring boundaries and physical proximities. The obscuring of a ‘frontal’ view of the cityscape ahead also directs a shift in perspective – a sideways pan, through the arches and into the passage that adjoins the far side of the street. And, in functioning as conjunction between one interior space and another, the portici interact with the imaginative experience of the individual traversing the city. The continuous – at times barely perceptible – re-configurations of plastic vocabulary (vault, support, decoration), coupled with the contrasts and modulations of changing light, trace a multivalent and unfolding space in which to project and ‘abstract’. This paper will explore some of the interior/exterior relationships in operation in Morandi’s work, his home and recently reconstructed studio, and the architectural landscape in which both are contained. The paper will interweave discussion of relevant texts with a descriptive (and visual) account of a visit to the city.

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