“How can one write about Bacci? Inscrutable, modest, sensitive, self-effacing man. I have no clue to him.”

“He is my Venetian neighbor. He lives one bridge away from me (this is how we measure distance in Venice). I meet him almost daily in the Calle near my home or at the Traghetto. Our greetings are formal but friendly, I never get to know him any better. So much for the mysterious little man. But his paintings, that is another matter. I know them. They are children of today. They are dynamic. They are the atomic bomb on canvas. They burst with light energy and color. Each new one is more vital than the last. I feel they are so explosive that they endanger the safety of my palace. Every time one is carried away by an enthusiastic American. I feel my home is in less danger. But then Bacci brings me a new one. Each one is more wonderful, more exciting, and even more dangerous. In each one there is more mystery and more poetry. It [a]ffects you as a dream does.

There is foresight in his color as it explodes in its joyous intoxication. I believe it is today the purest color let free in space. A frenetic power draws us into his game. Here are the poles of a wonderful poetic adventure. There is always red in Bacci, always light. This wonderful world of his makes life dizzy. This is a continual elevation of the spirit. Bacci’s work makes every thing magnetic with an internal feeling which is rich in décor and splendor. His painting is an explosion that sets a lyric fire to the world. And the world finds in his ‘Event’ extraordinary truth, intense dynamism that is akin to the phantomatic suggestions of the spirit. His paintings are all ‘Events.’ Different—they have a tie in their theme, never in their technique, because invention gives them a happy surprising originality.

In his creative freedom he reaches flaming summits, that have a fantastic order in their enchantment and surprise. I might suggest [Vasily] Kandinsky to find an equivalent in poetic power. In Bacci I believe there is a hidden source, unpredictable. His is a legend that gives us a daily miracle. One sees inside the painting, carried away by the vortex of its hidden destiny. There is nothing that is superfluous, but, as in every work that is strongly aesthetic, he is simple, tense, alive. For him color is a conflict of power and his material lives by his tension, it is sensitive and luminous. Bacci shows the purity of things that are authentic and original. His painting knows no geography; it belongs to the world of space. One does not know where the world goes. One does not know where Bacci goes.”

- Peggy Guggenheim, in Bacci (Venice: Edizioni del Cavallino, 1958), n.p.