Piero Persicalli began his studies at the Munich Academy in 1909, as a student of Habermann and Knirr. After a brief spell in Rome from 1912 to 1913, he moved to Vienna where he made his debut at the “Art Club”. In these early formative years, the artist became seduced by the more visionary aspects of Munich and Viennese secessionist aesthetics,[1] a key element that we find in all his later art.

In these same years he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris, while after the First World War he was present at the first Biennale di Romaand at the Fiorentina Primaverileof 1922 with Cardi in Riva al Mare (Cardoons on the Seashore) and Contadina dei Dintorni di Zara (Peasant Woman from near Zadar). Carlo Carrà wrote that Persicalli, “belongs to that category of our artists who have matured their art abroad.”[2]

At the Fiorentina Primaverileof 1922, Persicalli exhibited six paintings, including La sirena (FIG. 1), a painterly reworking of the drawing on cardboard presented here. In fact, Persicalli produced two preparatory drawings of the final work: the first, the one we are presenting, which features the whole figure of the mermaid sleeping in a calm night sea; the second (FIG. 2) from 1922, where only the tail of the fantastic marine is seen, as in the painting on canvas from the same year.

Two years later, in 1924, a work presented under the title Silenzio (Sirena) – Silence (Mermaid), would be exhibited in Milan at the Bottega di Poesia, a title which effectively renders the idea of silence evoked by the prone tail of the mermaid in the calm night sea. This may therefore have been the painting on canvas, or even the first idea on paper with the whole figure of the mermaid.

The tempera drawing presented here, clearly symbolist in style, certainly predates the painting and its definitive study by several years.

FIG. 1 - La sirena, 1922, oil on canvas

FIG. 2 - La sirena (definitive study), 1922, gouache on beige cardboard

It is important to note that mermaids, tritons and other sea creatures were among the most beloved subjects of the Nordic symbolists: both in the UK where we can see, for example, the numerous mermaids by John William Waterhouse; and in the Germanic regions, where the inventions of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin greatly impressed the young artists who trained in Munich; but also in the Scandinavian area, one only has to look at the mermaids of Edvard Munch whose work Persicalli may have seen at Die Moderne Kunsthandlung in Munich.