Portrait of Roberto Melli

Also in the Roman milieu, Gerardi turned to rustic meanings the spiritualist and symbolist premises of the so-called Roman Secession of 1913-14. His frequenting of the “Valori Plastici” group and his familiarity with the monumental researches of Melli the painter confirmed him in his aspiration to a close organic unity between religious ideals and material support, between luminous vibrations and solid plastic structure. Gerardi had long practice in craft work, as a fine embosser and chaser of metals, and this habit conditioned, even when he modelled, the slow incubation to which he subjected the configuration of his forms, which always seem on the point of emerging from painful imaginative elaborations, as if opening to the light healed sickly legacies of suffering.