Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi is an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers and landscapes.

His paintings are mind-expandingly simple and complex at once. His still lifes of bottles arranged against neutral backgrounds—his favored mode of expression—strike some as boring but others as boundless in their charms.

“After all, even a still life is architecture,” Morandi once said of a mode of painting for which he would arrange and rearrange similar-seeming objects as an imaginative city planner might.