Mater (Boccioni)

Mater (also known as Materia) is a 20th-century portrait painted in oil by Umberto Boccioni, made around 1912-1913, during the Futurism in Milano, Italy, exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

 Description 
Materia is clearly a full-length portrait of the artist's mother, the main subject of numerous canvases he made, as in the case of the mother with crochet from 1907.
The mother in the painting is portrayed sitting in her house frontally, so as to turn her back to a balcony overlooking the urban landscape behind Porta Romana in Milan.
This compositional choice serves to merge in a single "simultaneous vision" the optical perception of two distinct subjects, the metropolitan environment seen from Via Adige (Via Ripamonti) in Milan and the artist's mother.
The hands of the mother figure are represented crossed and gigantic and constitute the focus of the portrait.
The urban scenario of the Fondazione Prada district in Via Ripamonti appears as a space perfectly integrated with the human figure, the profiles of the houses are represented as generating nuclei of wide beams of transparent blue light, which illuminate the "mother" from above.
Typical of this painting is the energy that is formed thanks to the colors used, an energy that goes in every direction as is typical of the current it belongs to, the Futurism.

 Bibliography 
Omar Calabrese - Vittorio Giudici, Art dall'Ottocento a oggi, Mondadori Education, 2012

Other websites
Official Website Peggy Guggenheim

Category:Paintings at Porta Romana
Category:1910s paintings
Category:Paintings by Umberto Boccioni
Category:Paintings in Milan