oil on canvas, 95×120 cm
signed at lower left U.C.
This truly singularAllegory belongs to the period when Conti, forced by illness into enforced rest, had the revelation of color. The atmosphere there is that of Viareggio, between the house of Plinio Nomellini and that of Galileo Chini.
In addition to an iconography mediated by D’Annunzio’s taste in magazines such as “Leonardo,” Conti incorporated into the theme a grotesque secessionist, which gives the work its unprejudiced character: exoticism, desecration, and freedom of invention in the rehash of models, which it is the imagination that reappropriates, even where, as with the Negroes on either side, the scene from Bai Tabarin Looks as if observed from life.
