Notturno 

Felice Casorati painted this enigmatic image, "Notturno," sometime in the first half of the twentieth century in Italy. It depicts a nude figure set against an ambiguous interior of curtains and blue space. Casorati was active within a culture recovering from the first World War. In its wake, many artists moved away from avant-garde experimentation towards a cooler, more ordered aesthetic. There was a call to return to traditional values that were seen as constant, stable and implicitly ‘Italian’. Like other Italian artists of this period, Casorati looked back to the Old Masters for inspiration. Yet there's something about the strange, dreamlike atmosphere of this painting that resists any simple appeal to order. To understand this work better, we might want to investigate the ways that painting in interwar Italy became entangled with politics, or explore the ways that the human figure was used to convey ideas about national identity.