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Natura Morta (Still Life): Giorgio Morandi, 1943, oil on canvas, 22.8 x 35.3 cm(Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centers of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilization: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life.
Elizabeth Bowen: from The Death of the Heart, 1938
Elizabeth Bowen: from The Death of the Heart, 1938
Still Life (Natura morta): Giorgio Morandi, 1959, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 35.4 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond)
Natura morta (Still Life): Giorgio Morandi, 1952,oil on canvas, 54.29 x 59.37 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)