form. The world is to him an earthly paradise which he desires to clutch, to squeeze, to bite, to possess completely. Women, animals, plants, children: the nearest things, the things in reach, the things he can grasp most easily. His painting is a continual conquest, an almost sensual enjoyment renewed till weariness sets in. He is capable of drawing the same face a hundred times in all its different expressions, in all lights, in all positions, in all companies—never satisfied till he has captured and sucked and swallowed its visual completeness.
It takes but little to amuse and to content him: the shadows of a pergola, the edge of a table, the turn of a path, the corner of a room. But in his domestic scenes there must be living creatures, the same, it may be, from canvas to canvas. The world is so rich, so different from season to season and from hour to hour—and it is so hard to represent one single square of it with the full force of truth—that a humble dwelling and a simple family are enough, and more than enough, for the pictorial endeavor of a lifetime.
Spadini does not turn, for elements of interest or novelty, to history, mythology, or legend, nor—as is now the fashion—to the composition and dissection of unusual objects, to the bones of manikins, to the deformations of still life, to the design of abstract forms. If painting is to be independent of its subject, there is no reason,
