Virgilio Guidi

Countess Portrait - Lithograph by Virgilio Guidi - mid-20th Century

mid-20th Century

Virgilio Guidi was an Italian painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He was born in Rome into an artistic family. He was very passionate about geometry and design. He was trained under the guidance of Giulio Aristide Sartorio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and he was influenced by Spadini. He began to study artists such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Correggio and the French Chardin and Courbet and it was in this period that he began to reflect on the importance of light as a determining factor in his paintings. At the beginning of the 1920s, he began to see his paintings and visited The Third Room at the Caffè Aragno, where he came into contact with Giorgio De Chirico, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Roberto Longhi. In 1924, he achieved success at the XIV Biennale Internazionale d’Arte in Venice with his Tram, in which the desire to turn the image in a metaphysical sense is evident. At the end of the 70s his pictorial cycles became more intense, more restless and tense, these are the years of Meetings, Agitated Figures, Restless Figures. He took part in many important Italian exhibitions and was a member of the Novecento movement. He was very close to the Roman circle of the Comet of the Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt. He died in Venice in 1984.