Edita Broglio

Edita Broglio (Smiltene, 1886 Rome, 1977), born Edita Walterowna von Zur Muehlen, was a Latvian-born Italian painter, a central figure in the post-World War I artistic scene of magical realism and the return to order movement. Of noble Baltic origins, she studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art before moving to Rome in 1910, a city that became her adopted home and the fulcrum of her entire creative journey. In the effervescent climate of the capital, she became romantically and artistically attached to the painter Mario Broglio, whom she married in 1927. Together, in 1918, she founded the famous magazine "Valori Plastici," a periodical that exerted a major theoretical influence on European visual culture, promoting the transcendence of the Futurist avant-garde in favor of a recovery of classicism, form, and the great 15th-century Italian pictorial tradition. Edita Broglio's painting was distinguished by a meticulous technique and a unique sensitivity in capturing the stillness of things. Her still lifes, landscapes, and portraits are characterized by a suspended, enigmatic, and silent atmosphere, typical of Magic Realism. She exhibited in the Valori Plastici group exhibitions in Germany, at the Venice Biennials, and at the Rome Quadrennials. A woman of extraordinary culture and temperament, after World War Ii she retired to the Tuscan countryside, continuing to paint and preserving the theoretical and artistic legacy of one of the most intense periods of the Italian twentieth century.

Artworks

Ascension (1913)