Spartaco Zianna was born in 1925 in Valmontone, a small town about 45 km southeast of Rome but grew up in Rome in the neighbourhood of Portonaccio.
He was part of the group of artists called 'Scuola del Portonaccio', which formed right after the second World War, and included Armando Buratti, Marcello Muccini, Fausto Pinata, and most notably Renzo Vespignani and the photographer Graziella Urbinati.
'Vespignani wrote about the group in an article that was published in the magazine 'Realismo' in 1953. It was a group of very young artists that lived the experience of the war in the isolation of a suburb of Rome, under the influence of the fascist regime propaganda, and that remained disoriented from the collapse of the glorious illusions created by fascism.
The ruins of the houses destroyed during the war are the subject of many of their drawings and paintings, and are also the ruins of what they believed in, of the rhetoric they grew up in.' *
The Portonaccio group was associated with the Italian Realist movement since the Venice Biennale of 1950. 'There was a movement within the Realism movement, in which a new painting was taking form. A painting in which ideological and social themes appeared to be secondary, while some existential tensions were evident, together with metaphysical concerns and a clear interest in forms and aesthetics' *
'Paesaggio montano' is not dated but it could be a post-1950s, maybe a later painting by Spartaco Zianna. The subject is the nature in the countryside just outside the city, likely around is hometown of Valmontone.
While the theme of existentialism and the metaphysical concerns are not obvious, but might have been intended by the artist and could be read in the painting, the interest in forms, aesthetics and light is clear and conveys to the picture a subtle and delicate beauty.
* translated from 'Arte in Italia', 1945-1960 edited by Luciano Caramel
