In 1993 Franco and Roberta Calarota of Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. have realized an innovative exhibition dedicated to Gino Severini. On the occasion of "Gino Severini. The rule, the mask, the sacred", Maggiore g.a.m. moved and built, inside the historical venue of Maggiore g.a.m. in Bologna, the original and entire room of the Montegufoni Castle's fresco painted by Severini in the 1921 called "La Sala delle Maschere / The room of the masks". The artwork commissioned by Sir Osbert George Sitwell, owner of Montegufoni. The exhibition presented an excursus on the work of Gino Severini and as Severini, himself, said: «the characters of "Commedia dell'Arte / Comedy of Art" gave me the possibility to humanize the geometry and to give that sense of mystery and fantastic which has been used by Surrealist». As curiosity: during the World War II some masterpieces as "Primavera" by Sandro Botticelli and the "Madonna di Ognissanti" by Giotto has been moved from Uffizi Gallery to Montegufoni's Castle in order to be protect and hidden.
Towards the end of 1920 the art dealer Léonce Rosemberg communicated to Gino Severini, who was staying in the Bligny nursing home, that an important client in London - Sir George Sitwell Bart, together with his children Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell - they decided to entrust him with the decoration of a room of their Castle of Montegufoni, near Florence. If at the beginning the clients were undecided whether to entrust Severini or Picasso, now they were offering the Italian master good economic conditions and a stay of six months in Italy. In exchange for this mediation, Rosemberg asked Severini about twenty gouaches with scenes from the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte", very close to a "Harlequin" previously sent to Sitwell as a proof of his work.
Severini, who from 1917 was overcoming the Cubist language to move towards the idea of a "poetic realism" characterized by a plastic-geometric construction of a classical matrix, begins the work of Montegufoni in the spring of 1921. Having established that the artist will have to decorate a small room near a living room, the artist began to think about his compositions of masks and still lifes, within areas obtained from a mathematical subdivision of spaces, in which the doors and windows also share the same geometric pattern. The painter's Tuscan spirit clearly emerges together with his need for order and clarity which is the common denominator of his work: his passion for the poetic potential of numbers and for that rigor of construction which is traceable since his Divisionist and Futurist tests.
Severini is a Tuscan spirit who looks to the golden section and to Piero della Francesca, and which saturates the outdoor scenes inhabited by Arlecchino, Pulcinella, Peppe Nappa and Tartaglia, with the same blue and clear light that we find in the famous works of the master of Borgo San Sepolcro. But the spaces of the scenes painted in the castle of Montegufoni do not present themselves as deceptive perspectives: they appear rather as symbolic spaces populated by still lifes and masks with an allegorical meaning: symbols that refer to contemporary society and its contradictions, to that “discomfort of civilization” which certainly could not be told by classical language or the optimistic futurist dynamism.
