Vatican Museums

Gentilini produced St. Peter’s Square at the end of the 1940s, when he had lived in Rome for around twenty years. He arrived in the city in 1929; like many young artists, he had been strongly attracted by the research undertaken at the time by the artists who subsequently became famous as the Roman School. The influence of the tonalism that marked their painting appears again in the views of Roman squares and suburbs that Gentilini painted following the Second World War is clear, as is the effect of the encounter with Cubism and Surrealism during a stay in Paris in 1947. In this way, urban spaces are born of his imagination, in which the alteration of proportions gives rise to bewildering and alienating visions, as in the two canvases displayed here.