Rich in compositional elegance, Scanno, L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy, 1951 illustrates how the convergence of formal elements can lead to visual analogies. Henri Cartier-Bresson's high vantage point allows for a depth of detail, enabling the viewer to make correlations between the bread atop the women's heads, the children by their sides, and the writing on the church's facade ("mater" in Latin is translated to "mother"). Together, they illuminate a basic human understanding, a mother's love and nurturing of her children, all within a composition that is undoubtedly inspired by Cubism.
While on assignment for publications such as Holiday and Harper’s Bazaar, Henri Cartier-Bresson explored the cities, neighborhoods, and towns of Italy and Greece, unveiling the countries’ unique charm to the magazines’ readerships. For Harper’s Bazaar Cartier-Bresson ventured to Rome in the fall of 1951, and later that year Scanno (lot 37) to capture the city at Christmas. In 1953, Cartier-Bresson went on assignment for Holiday. The premise of the magazine during its thirty year run, from 1946 to 1977, was to send out duos of writers and photographers to produce dynamic and enticing reportage without the constraints of a dictated style, budget, or page count. With this creative freedom in hand, Cartier-Bresson traveled extensively in Italy and throughout Europe with his wife Ratna Mohini and the writer Inge Morata, likely capturing images such as Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon (lot 43). Trips such as this revealed not only Italy’s natural landscape, but also its constructed social landscape, and Cartier-Bresson’s unique ability to find the serendipity and humor of life led him to moments like a child gleefully running into a single ray of light (lot 42) and a man cautiously peering out his shop window (lot 39), both captured in Rome.
Cartier-Bresson’s trips throughout Italy also included documenting major religious events, such as the crowning of Pope John XXIII and cultural holidays like the Befana Festival during Epiphany. The folklore of the Befana tells, the tale of an elderly woman who travels by broomstick to deliver gifts to children on Epiphany Eve, a Christian holiday. Photo-stories of these events illustrated the deeply rooted influence of Catholicism on Italy’s religious-political structures, and on the country’s idiosyncratic cultural nuances.