from January 1, 2015 through March 22, 2015. 25. Landini, “Alle origini della grande moda italiana: Maria Monaci Gallenga,” 36. 26. Francesca Cagianelli and Dario Matteoni, Déco: Arte in Italia, 1919 – 1939 (Milan: Silvana: 2009), 24. 27. Roberta Boglione, “Il Japonisme in Italia: Parte Seconda, 1900 – 1930,” Il Giappone 39 (1999): 15. 28. Weinberg, Stile Floreale: The Cult of Nature in Italian Design, 17. 29. Ibid. 30. Fabio Benzi, Liberty e Déco: Mezzo secolo di stile italiano (1890 – 1940) (Milan: F. Motta, 2007), 88. 31. Roberta Boglione, “Il Japonisme in Italia: Parte Seconda, 1900 – 1930,” 15. 32. It is important to note that similar patterns inspired by traditional Japanese aesthetics were also adopted by many other Italian artists, such as Galileo Chini (1873–1956). Chini was a prominent member of the Stile Floreale movement. Weinberg features a 1910 Chini fireplace surround with patterns comparable to those found on the Gallenga and Sensani textiles. Weinberg, Stile Floreale: The Cult of Nature in Italian Design 90, 92. 33. Landini, “Alle origini della grande moda italiana: Maria Monaci Gallenga,” 36. 34. Mario Quesada and Shara Wasserman, “Letter from Rome,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 3 (Winter 1987): 122. 35. Gino Sensani and Vittorio Zecchin (1878 – 1947), another Gallenga collaborator, also presented artworks in the Secessioni Romane. Landini, “Alle origini della grande moda italiana: Maria Monaci Gallenga,” 31. 36. Carlano, “Maria Monaci Gallenga: A Biography,” 74. A 1929 advertisement found in Vogue magazine mentions that some of the designs found in Gallenga linens came from unpublished artist drawings. It is unclear whether the motifs found on the Cooper Hewitt’s textiles came from unpublished
drawings by Sensani or another source. “Advertisement: La Boutique Italienne,” Vogue, August 1929, 20. 37. Gloria Raimondi, “MONACI, Maria,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 75 (2011), accessed January 18, 2016, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/mariamonaci_(Dizionario_Biografico)/. Gallenga also became a founding member of the Società Magna Grecia that same year. The Società, made up of prominent members of Italy’s cultural community, financed and initiated numerous excavations and restoration projects in Southern Italy focusing on the archeological remains of the Greeks and Byzantines. de Haan, “The ‘Società Magna Grecia’ in Fascist Italy,” 114. 38. While many of Gallenga’s domestic textiles, including those designed by Sensani, were made from silks with metallic pigments brushed or printed onto their luxurious weaves, others were made from lightweight, semi-sheer cotton or linen with white-work embroidery, such as a tablecover designed by Vittorio Zecchin, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000-126-1). Like the Gallenga and Sensani collaboration, Gallenga and Zecchin’s partnership was a combination of traditional and modern aesthetics, as well as their own. As seen in the textile’s playful rendering of frolicking gazelles, Zecchin’s artworks were influenced by the decorative style of the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918), as well as the colorful Byzantine and medieval mosaics found in Venice, his hometown. Typical of Gallenga, the embroidered textile both evokes traditional Italian domestic textiles and, as a 1929 Lord & Taylor advertisement notes, “emphasizes the modern trend in flat embroidery on sheer organdy or linen.” See: “Display Ad 44 – No Title,” New York Times, October 21, 1929, 12; Doretta Davanzo Poli, Twentieth-Century Fabrics: European and American Designers and Manufacturers (Milan: Skira, 2007), 24; and Giuseppe Dell' Oro, “Venetian Mosaics,” East and West 4, no. 2 (JULY 1953): 136 – 137.
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