FNetti

The odalisque

Oil on canvas, cm 46,3x61,7

Signatures at the top left «FNetti»

Santèramo in Colle, private collection

The painting has quite recent documentation. Christine Farese Sperken talks about it for the first time in 1996, in her script Francesco Netti, opening the public to its recent appearance in the art market. It is part of the painter’s orientalist production, which began with his trip to Turkey in 1884. Also in this work you can find the background that is recurring in this production, such as the large carpet, the walls covered with beautiful vestments decorated as the orientalist mood. The odalisque wraps her legs in a precious fabric placed on the sofa, leaving naked the rest of the body, of marble beauty. A openly erotic atmosphere, which shows Netti, more condescending to the taste of a certain bourgeois patronage. The woman’s turned and sensual body stands out in the interior designed with shades of blue and gold that contribute to this new (and limited at this juncture of its production) inclination to the market of Netti, which sets aside his proverbial discretion towards his subject; its measure can also be found in a weighted chromatism. Here we overcome all this deliberately, in the name of greater specificity and pleasantness.



It is important to point out, in order to properly exploit this Netti’s work, an error in which a simple curious could incur browsing the internet. In fact, The Odalisque on some websites is linked to the painter and photographer Francesco Paolo Michetti, but it is necessary to take distances from this attribution. Michetti is not interested in this type of subjects, as in the Orientalism in general.