The Spirit of Collaboration: Gino Severini, Jacques Maritain, Anton Luigi Gajoni and the Roman Mosaicists

This paper considers a little-known aspect of Gino Severini‟s oeuvre, his religious commissions, in light of his collaborative friendship with the French neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. The collaboration between Severini and Maritain was a dynamic process of exchange, in which they shared both directly and indirectly their individual expertise as artist and philosopher to arrive at their creative objective of a modern sacred art. Gino Severini's futurist canvases inspired Maritain's understanding of the avant-garde, while Maritain's aesthetic treatise Art et Scholastique (1920) provided the means for Severini to reconcile the spheres of discipline and intuition, to realise the common ground between the spiritual and the artistic researches of the avant-garde, and to find an accord between art and morality. It was also thanks to his friendship with Maritain that Severini be-came one of the first protagonists within Europe to renew sacred art in light of the artistic languages of the avant-garde.