DONATI, ENRICO

DONATI, ENRICO (1909– ), Italian surrealist and abstract painter. He was born in Milan, and studied piano and composition before becoming a commercial artist and later a painter. In 1934 he moved to Paris, and subsequently to New York. Donati's art is largely inspired by geological phenomena. A collector of strange gems and ores, his paintings reflect their shifting, transparent colors. In 1949 he found a smooth, small stone on the beach at Dover in England. On breaking it open, he saw it contained a perfect fossil. From that time he became preoccupied with the theme of fossilization. At first he painted "moonscapes," depicting imaginary views down the center of a fossil, and then made a series of paintings depicting the surface of a fossilized plant or rock. Later he painted new themes, suggestive of immemorial antiquity: human imprints in sand and ancient inscriptions on cylinder seals and tablets. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: P. Selz, Enrico Donati (1965).