M ario Carreño was only 26 when he executed Arlequín in 1939, yet thanks to his many travels and swift aesthetic development throughout the 1930s, he had reached a pivotal moment in his stylistic maturation at the time he completed the present work. Born in 1913, Carreño would be at the helm of the Cuban Vanguardia alongside Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero, and Amelia Peláez. He began his formal training in 1925 at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana and left for Mexico in 1936. He was transfixed by the murals he encountered there, but by 1937, he had taken off to Paris, a decisive trip for the artist. There, his exposure to the Louvre’s holdings would launch an exploration of Neoclassical themes that would consume his production in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

An admirer of the Italian Renaissance, Carreño wove references to Quattrocento paintings into the composition of the present work. Two nude figures stride, frozen in conversation, against a background resembling fifteenth century Florence. Statuesque and stately, together they recall Renaissance images of Adam and Eve. The colors, however, are made more vivid and saturated—the sky glows in a gradiant of green and teal, and a boat sails through a fluorescent ocean. Both figures are imbued with a Giotto-like mass and weight, the woman with a Botticellian curvature. The open, bloodless wound on the left of the man’s chest recalls Renaissance depictions of the crucified Christ, and the couple is thoughtfully modeled with the classical attention to the human form and anatomy in mind, so much so that the figure on the left is skinned, a man made only of musculature.

Carreño’s interpretations of Renaissance and Neoclassical imagery in this period were never without an American bent. Whether in his use of color, inclusion of native flora, or more explicit references to the birth of Latin America, he used his practice as part of a socio-political project. Carreño reimagined the art historical past to construct a national and regional visual identity, allegorizing Latin American history in paint.