The work Alla toeletta (1906) by the Roman painter Camillo Innocenti takes us to the beginning of the century, in which there is a reference to the refined atmospheres and touch of Giovanni Boldini. Thanks to the quick brushstrokes, the artist manages to capture the young woman in the intimacy of her space, expressing feelings of surprise, delicacy, fragility and mysteries typical of contemporary life and the female world.
The new century opens with the adherence of many painters of the new generations to divisionism, a current born in the wake of the European experiments of the last decades of the nineteenth century, based on the decomposition of color and on the possibility of a rational rendering of objects and light .
In Italy, divisionism embraces both symbolist abstraction and intimate and contemplative aspects; examples are La modella (1915) by Arturo Noci, in which a naked girl is intent on combing her hair with her face and breasts bathed in sunlight, while the rest of her body is covered by semi-darkness. This work appears to be a veritable essay of style, in which sun and shadow alternate, highlighted by the filamentous streaks of the line.
The work Mattino d’estate (1913) by Aleardo Terzi, expertly constructed with small pieces of pure colour, is flooded with light, in an extraordinary framing that restores a moment of female intimacy: a window that illuminates the space in which a girl – naked, from the back – rests her head thoughtfully on one hand.