L. FELLI (Italy, active late 19th - early 20th century).
"Female nude".
Marble.
Exhibitions: "European sculpture of the 20th century", European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM), Barcelona, 2014.
Size: 80 x 20 x 20 cm.
A young nymph holds a bouquet of flowers in her right hand, placing it in her delicate hair gathered up in a messy hairstyle. The soft curvature of her naked body stands out in terms of elegance, being reinforced by the delicate veil that wraps her legs and that, at the same time, is lined with fine flowers at the back. The artist shows a young woman in movement, moving forward, raising her left arm in a dynamic, harmonious and refined attitude. This is a representation of the ethereal nymph who lives immersed in nature. In the 1900s and more specifically in Art Nouveau, under the influence of Symbolist literature, women were considered to be beings of transformation and metamorphosis, and for this reason they were often depicted with extreme fantasy, being associated with the supernatural and the unknown. The feminine is intimately associated with the hidden part of nature, with the mysterious and therefore attractive and seductive. The fragile woman, with narrow shoulders and a stylised figure, like a nymph or sylph, lures men inexorably towards perdition. She is thus conceived as a contradictory figure, exotic and weak in appearance but demonic in essence. Here, however, the woman does not look directly at the viewer, luring the man to his destruction with her irresistible gaze. On the contrary, she appears lost in her own thoughts, unaware of our gaze and therefore unattainable, as belonging to another world, the world of the mysterious, of dreams, the dark side of nature. This timeless character is further enhanced by the fact that the sculptor depicts her almost naked, so that we see no clothes or ornaments that would associate her with a particular period, not even with classicism. She is therefore the personification of an ideal, but she is at the same time a fully corporeal figure, magnificently modelled in her anatomy and movements, endowed with great elegance and gracefulness, and also possessing a marked personality, as revealed by the "mal du siécle" that we can see in her melancholy face, in her bowed head, in her aimless walk through the forest.