Cardinale Vannuttelli on his Deathbed, 1930

Together with Antonietta Raphaël, Mario Mafai and Marino Mazzacurati, the artist created the so-called School of Rome or “School of Via Cavour,” a movement that made a courageous attempt to move away from the official art and the iconography of the regime.

Fascinated by the work of artists like El Greco, Velázquez, Tintoretto and Goya, and almost obsessed with the decaying atmosphere of baroque Rome, he developed a visionary and intensely expressionistic style, constantly overshadowed by a sense of mortality and transience and conveyed through a liquid brushwork based on warm and deep colors, chiefly shades of brown.
In 1929 and 1930 he produced a series of paintings rooted in the Rome of popes and cardinals, of which Cardinale Vannutelli on His Deathbed constitutes a particularly significant example, with its decadent and visionary atmosphere inspired by Goya and Velázquez.