Extremely famous, award-winner, praised to the skies…all this when he was still alive. Felice Carena (1879-1966) was born in the Piedmont and later moved to Rome. He arrived in Venice right after the war. The city mobilized to receive him. In a note found in Guido Cadorin’s autobiographical journal we learn of the confusion provoked by the arrival of such a prominent master. Everyone bustled to give him proper accommodation. As a result of several offers Carena settled into the mezzanine floor of the Palace where the Cadorin family lived, at 2534 Fondamenta Briati. From here he sent a letter to Ardengo Soffici in Forte dei Marmi where he confesses: “(…) as I am now completely devoid of ambition and above all quarrels and miseries, my work is less nerve-racking and, even if economically I have to struggle, I live and hope”.

He sees local artists and the lagoon intelligentsia; he befriended with Vittorio Cini, Gilberto Errera, art historians such as Rodolfo Pallucchini and Guido Perocco, musician Francesco Malipiero, poets Aldo Palazzeschi and Ugo Fasolo, italianist Vittore Branca and gallerist Carlo Cardazzo among many others. Some remember him wandering embittered and troubled in the calles, with a marked tendency to complain who provided him the epithet of “greatest dying painter”. So he spoke to a young painter visiting in his studio: “Eh! For you as well the time will come that you won’t be able to sleep at night because you can’t find the right colour for an apple…”.

Venice pays tribute to him with an exhaustive anthological show held at the Insitute for Sciences, Humanities and Arts of Veneto in Palazzo Franchetti, “Felice Carena and the years of Venice” (from 27 May to 18 July) curated by Virgina Baradel. Markedly of late romantic taste, two portraits of his sisters reveal symbolist influences; the diaphanous face turns pale and the half-closed eye foretells. Dating a few years later the portrait of baroness Ferrero is soaked in a decadent atmosphere. Carena paints in the old master’s way, big canvasses covered by a bodily matter so prominent as to make them look three-dimensional. He tortures the canvass (and himself) by going back to work on it many times, to review and correct. He manipulates and reinterprets the painted surface. He quotes, emulates and combines. It is a continuous and conflicting activity all along the years. “To insist-to work” seems to be his motto. He is restlessly looking to escape the Eighteenth century in order to grasp Modernity; this is why he is so focused on the practices developed beyond the Alps: Cezanne, Derain, Gauguin, the Fauves, Bonnard. To then impetuously come back and assault the Renaissance, the Seicento. “Still in doubt between too easy assimilations” this is what Margherita Sarfatti says of him in a review at the Venice Biennale in the Twenties. In the faces he paints we recognize the sore and contrite expression of those struck by the pietas for the human misery. Carena’s Catholicism is dramatic and troublesome. Jesus Christ chases and “haunts” him all along his professional trajectory. Dating back to 1910, the body of Christ is overthrown and livid, it looks as a source of inspiration for contemporary artist Marlene Dumas; and the distressed and distorted Christ in the last “Pietà”. Calm and thoughtful are his still life, clearly inspired by Morandi. Maybe they were made in the rare moments in which Carena felt at ease with himself, his touch is more relaxed and peaceful. A large number of works is on show, as to remind of a “quadreria”. The exhibition starts with a portrait of Carena made by Guido Cadorin upon Carena’s arrival in Venice in 1945. The atmosphere is of painful desolation. The eyelids of the old painter are heavy and his glance is absent, deep shadows thicken on his face. His expression is modest and melancholically acquiescent.