Bartolomeo Butori, Lucca, Mythological Scene With A Dragon, Dated 1950

Bartolomeo Butori, Lucca, Mythical Theme with Dragon
Dated 1950

Bartolomeo Butori
Lammari, Lucca, 1912 – Lucca, 1969

Mixed media on rigid panel
Signed lower left
Dated “1950” lower right
Dimensions without frame: 60 × 80 cm
Dimensions with frame: 72 × 92 cm
Modern frame
On the reverse there is an inscription with the artist’s name and address, as well as the title Tema mitico.

Signed and dated 1950, this work is by Bartolomeo Butori, a Lucchese painter active in the twentieth century. The title written on the reverse, Tema mitico, confirms the fantastic and symbolic nature of the scene.

The painting presents a mountainous landscape with an archaic, dreamlike and almost surreal atmosphere. The rocks and vegetation take on an organic presence, while the dark sky reinforces the sense of suspension. In the lower part of the composition appears a young blonde woman, nude, rendered as a luminous presence within the landscape; before her stands a fantastic creature, close to the image of a dragon.

The work belongs to the more imaginative side of Butori’s production, close to his literary and allegorical subjects. A useful comparison can be made with his compositions related to the Decameron, also documented in the collections of the Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in Lucca, where the landscape becomes the setting for apparitions, isolated figures and suspended atmospheres.

Bartolomeo Butori was born in Lammari, near Lucca, in 1912, and died in Lucca in 1969. Alongside landscapes and compositions closer to the Tuscan tradition, he also developed invented, literary and fantastic subjects. This Mythical Theme belongs to that rarer group of works, where myth, narrative and a primordial vision meet in a painting of strong poetic intensity.