Louise E. Marianetti
An Italian heritage often weighs heavy on an artistic talent. Louise Marianetti, a first-generation Italian- American lost her mother at the age of four to influenza and was embraced by a warm and supportive familial network of aunts, uncles and cousins in Rhode Island. By the age of ten private lessons and Saturday classes at the Rhode Island School of Design honed her artistic talent.
It is in Marianetti’s self-portraits that we can probe for the inner thoughts of the artist, how she evolved her persona and her search for professional identity.
Early works such as “Thoughtful” are obsessively painted unabashedly reveling in every aspect of her face from her luxurious hair to her prominent upper lip mole. Gwinn Owens of the Providence Journal notes that it is “a painstaking accomplishment, rich and effective.”
Later self-portraits show the virtuosity of the artist and her use of dramatic light in homage to the Renaissance painters she studied. Expressive eyes eerily stare out to judge the viewer while alter egos creep in on the edges of the paper. By late 1949 the artist marries her technical know-how of various media with her personal confidence.
Many an artistic voice is lost in art school and graduate level study as an artist negotiates through technical mastery of multiple media, artistic philosophies and teaching methods. Louise Marianetti melded a strong Italian identity, deep Catholic religious faith and prideful self-confidence in a personal identity that guided her painting technique, subject matter and style of painting.
In the pre-World War II era where realism dominates she settles on labor-intensive media of egg tempera, casein and silverpoint drawing. These media are not for the “faint of heart” artists with average technical skills. The confident Marianetti chose to expose her technical virtuosity to colleagues and critics alike immediately upon her post Rhode Island School of Design graduate study at the Art Students’ League with William C. Palmer and Robert Brackman.
The Vose Gallery Spring 1949 exhibit, that traveled to the Newport Art Museum two months later, is the central exhibit of Marianetti’s career. She exhibited works of art encompassing three media – egg tempera, gouache and silver point pencil. Some of the egg tempera paintings had been previously exhibited at the Providence Art Club between 1939 – 1949. “At the market” an egg tempera on board painting shows the influence of her mentors William Palmer and Robert Brackman. There was a resurgence among American artists of egg tempera, the dominant media of early Italian Renaissance painters Botticelli, … The choice of this media by Marianetti was also a comfortable fit with the artist’s pride of her Italian heritage and intense study of Italian Renaissance painters.
For the remainder of her career Marianetti’s realist work co-existed with the abstractionists and she continued to exhibit through-out her career garnering one- person exhibits at the Newport Art Museum, Columbia University, Moses Brown School and South County Art Association.
