Events

Costantino Nivòla, between Salvatore Fancello and Le Corbusier.

The detail of an elegant  ‘frivolitè’ embroidered insert on a linen byssus tablecloth, teal coloured.

“…Psychoanalysis consists in walking on all fours – that is partnership, without confusion of subjects or legs – which, if it ends well, still remain as an endowment (or dowry) for the following life too”[2].

Born at Orani, near Nuoro (Sardinia, Italy) in 1911, fifth of ten siblings, his father as a bricklayer, Costantino Nivòla soonest stood out for his own strong talent in drawing : even working as a hod-man with father and brothers, in 1926 he was called as an apprentice to the painter Mario Delitala at Sassari town, where he then received assignments from new clients until 1931, when he could move to Monza thanks to a modest scholarship obtained from the ‘Consiglio dell’Economia Corporativa’ of Nuoro, in order to attend the ‘Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche’.

At ‘I.S.I.A.’ in Monza-MB Italy he met Salvatore Fancello and Giovanni Pintori, both of them younger than him and coming from Sardinia too : with them in 1934 he will organiz a painting exhibition in Nuoro, buti t was not warmly welcomed. In the same year he was suspended from the Institute as he refused to give a Roman salute, and avoided the expulsion only thanks to Gianni Ticca, a generous entrepreneur from Sassari who had commissioned to Costantino the first early works : returned to the I.S.I.A., he met the young Ruth Guggenheim, of Jewish origin, who was attending the same Institute and who in a few years would have become his own wife.

In the company of the Sardinian youngmen, whom Ruth and Renata Guggenheim joined, Costantino was standing out for his entrepreneurship and communication skill, involving Salvatore Fancello[3] among others, orphaned of father and mother, and clearly burdened with economical  responsibilities towards sisters and brothers at Dorgali (Sardinia) : already talented, five years younger than Nivòla, Salvatore was passionately attending at I.S.I.A.’s Course for potters; Costantino deemed him gifted with talent in painting which in the following years would have made him appreciated as an artist and no more just as a decorator. Last of twelve siblings, Salvatore Fancello was expressing an early talent in drawing, so much that his teachers made sure that he continued his studies instead of going to work as it used in the poorest families  : “It is noted that the pupil Fancello (…) has a marked tendency for drawing and the applied arts, and he is deserving of all help…”[4] He could so work as an apprentice with other selected fellows in the potter’s workshop of Ciriaco Piras, and a few photographs still remain of that time : the work-shop was famous throughout Sardinia because it exported manufactured items thanks to ongoing orders, and from this experience Salvatore Fancello got pretious connections which brought in, still in the first years at Monza, dedicated commissions. Around 1934 the ‘Creazione Fancello‘ brand was born with his own decorated items, and reported on Milan ‘Domus’ magazine, directed by the architect and designer Giò Ponti : his admirer and loyal supporter was Giulio Carlo Argan, famous teacher and critic of Art.

In order to manufacture dishes and commissioned vases, Salvatore sent tight technical specifics to his brother-in-law’s work-shop at Dorgali: “On faces and on hands you can leave the ‘terracotta’ colour as it is beautiful. Pay attention to the colours and don’t do candy things. Colours have to be neat (small mixtures). As you can see I’ve made a few sketches, so that seems enough to me to give you an idea of the colour. Then you, who are right there and daily watch at the costumes, know them more than me…”[5]

Monza’s I.S.I.A. is an emanation of the ‘Società Umanitaria’ in Milan, a famous Socialist institution for worker assistance, associated with Monza and Milan municipalities in order to manage a state-of-the-art vocational training school education for future ‘Masters of Art’ : in those rich years at Monza, from taciturn and solitary Salvatore Fancello rapidly became an attentive and cultured interlocutor towards his own teachers who appreciated and were encouraging his art inspired by the dreamlike and to a fanciful re-interpretation of hieratic characters, animals, plants, landscapes until his satisfactory participation to the ‘VI Triennale’ at the ‘Palazzo dell’Arte’ of Milan – where since 1936 he moved together with Nivòla and Pintori – with a large wall, scratched with an ironically colonial subject and a mosaic of lithoceramic tiles, he signed together with Costantino Nivòla. The immediately following years were full of reviews from critics and prestigious orders : he’ve been working at Padua, Albisola (near Savona), and at last he received the commission for a commemorative panel, with a white feminine figure on a background of deep blue colour of about 12 square meters from the architect Giuseppe Pagano – who, as an antifascist will die in the Nazi lager of Mauthausen six years later – for the canteen of the “Luigi Bocconi” University in Milan, installed in 1941 and financed by the artist himself, who in the meantime had been called to arms, notwithstanding many friends did their best to avoid to him the Albanian front where instead he would have died in March of the same year.

Already in 1938 Costantino chose to move to the United States with his wife Ruth, after learning that his friend and Sardinian painter Carmelo Floris was arrested and that Nivòla himself was wanted. Salvatore Fancello, who at that time was starting a correspondence with Renata, Ruth’s sister, didn’t answer the invitation to join the friend, nor insisted in order to obtain the exemption from the military service. His gift for Costantino’s wedding remains that very very long (668 cm x 29,4) “Disegno ininterrotto” at Indian ink and watercoloured on teleprinter paper which Fancello was always supplied with, a ‘continuum’ of days preluding the wedding where to the homesick due to a too short childhood are connected anxieties and silent recommendations about the heritage of a culture, the Sardinian one, by now so far away : that work remained by Giovanni Pintori who could deliver it  to the couple just when the war ended[6].

In Milan, working together in 1937 for the setting up of the ‘Padiglione Italiano’ at the ’Esposizione Internazionale’ in Paris, Costantino met Spanish artists with whom he matured antifascist sentiments, and also at Paris, where he stayed for a while with Ruth before continuing to the United States, he offered articles for the journal of the ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ movement : arrived in New York he found a job as ‘art director’ for the magazine Interiors, so meeting architects and also European design specialists like Gropius, Breuer, as well as De Kooning, Léger, Pollock with whom he built friendships; he adhered to the ‘Mazzini Society’, an antifascist association attended also by Franco Modigliani and Toscanini and as well he met the young architect Peter Blake. Between 1944 and 1946 his children Pietro and Claire were born, and he had his first exhibition at the ‘MoMa’ of New York.

The holding of Jung theories[7] in the United States, which landed there with popularity, however didn’t satisfy him, and particularly that ‘collective unconscious’ which Jung had hung to immanent archetypals, mostly the ‘Great Mother’.

For Costantino Ruth was the novelty of a feminine partner, and not an inspiring ‘muse’, menacing in her ideality, part of those archetypals which got to such emotion the Modernists[8].

It is impressive indeed his individual and artistic path which led him to detachedly describe the woman-mother whom he portrays in 1958  as recognizable, burdened and resistent under the load of a massive traditional vase (‘Mother’s tomb’), to then shade and in many versions into the white stone of ‘Cycladic culture’ – for example : ‘Mother’ of 1981 – similar to a cloud-totem from which a short cane sorts out, even ressembling to his preceeding ‘Idolo’ (1952) where the stone is emptied inside.

In 1946 he met Le Corbusier, with whom and generously he shared the studio for four years – as already he did with Fancello and Pintori at his own studio at Via Garibaldi in Milan, but now notwithstanding the excesses of character  of the brilliant architect : as a matter of fact, thanks to the acquaintance of Le Corbusier, Nivòla decidedly switches to sculpture and to ‘informal art’ which privileged the material and the special manner to treat it. Nivòla begun his special technique he would have called ‘sand casting’, he invented when playing with children on Spring beach at East Hampton and making a first panel in plaster for the Olivetti showroom in New York which paid an international success to him. In the meanwhile he was appointed director of the Design Workshop at the University of Harvard.

It is with the young friend’s family that the nomadic, world famous architect often stayed and happy : we can look at him in the photos of the time, incredibly and maybe for the first time pacified. The bitter frustration of Le Corbusier, not at all gratified in his second stay in New York in 1946 and notwithstanding his excellent references, during his participation to the international team of architects to which the project of the United Nations building was committed, led him to devote himself to drawing he considered his own orientation talent, and to painting he was facing after meeting the work and the appreciation of an already famous Picasso[9].

Described by those who observed him during the long work sessions by the Headquarter of the Commission in New York as a silent and solitary voyager, however his buildings on sand remain, in less official photos of those years, he made together with Costantino and children, or the pique-niques on the grass of Nivòla’ house garden with Ruth and the little Claire in her arms.

The long conversations between Costantino and Le Corbusier, so different men but both of them intelligent precursors, became a mutual learning, so tracing in their life some deep and fruitful guidances : for the architect it was impossible to develop ideas without an audience, and questions and observations received from Nivòla were incisive and lasting for his own art.

In the years between 1946 and 1953 of their partnership and friendship, ‘Le Corbu’ – as he liked nickname himself – published the article ‘L’espace indicible’ and the volume ‘Poème de l’angle droit’[10] where he stated the primate of drawing and painting compared with the architecture, in an ideal continuity which was the real ‘leit motiv’ of his work.

For Nivòla, the mural paintings in his Long Island house (‘Long Island mural’, 1950) were an artistic indispensable reference as well as a sure sign of friendship from an older architect : because at last it was the painting indeed which could destroy ‘the barrier’ of a wall, so making it ‘ineffable’ and ‘unspeakable’ of the reality which should guide one’s own life.

That was a real ‘beginning’ for Le Corbusier, notwithstanding his advanced age : for the first time his work now became discursive, soft, convincing instead of shouting, majestic, generalized as in the first, frenetic explosive decades of his activity : and it is of these years (1950-1955) the project for the delightful Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, destination of religious pilgrimages in the French countryside.

And even more stands out the very nice ‘Le Cabanon’ (1950 – 1952) at Roquebrune-Cap Martin, which Le Corbusier described as “my own castle of three meters for four…” and set in Cote d’Azur, dotted with haughty villas : it is only fifteen years before the majestic ‘Le Corbusier-Gallis’, a villa he projected for himself and his beloved Yvonne - who however didn’t feel at her ease - in which the famous ‘ribbon’ windows and the overhead doors of the innovative ‘machine à habiter’ try to dissolve a rough distance between man and Nature.

For Costantino Nivòla, the lesson learned by Le Corbusier who was still trying, even if with weary stubbornness, to cling to a de-imputative ‘continuum’ of real on reality, led him to conjugate the novelty of his art whereas it was appreciated : so in 1957 he made the excellent decoration for the Mutual Hartford Insurance Company of Hartford, in Connecticut; in 1965 he carried out at Nuoro the arrangement of the square dedicated to to the poet Sebastiano Satta; in 1967 he made sculptures for the Public School 320 of Brooklyn, for the White Plains Plaza, for the Children’s Psychiatric Hospital in Bronx at New York and for many U.S.A. cities; in 1978 he begun teaching at the Berkeley University in California, where he also had a personal exhibition.

The parable of Nivòla’s life can be considered a Case of competence in the care of one’s thinking, when you get to judge about a ‘ceasing damage’ and drop your pathological diseconomics[11] and as well avert narcissism and melencholy : however the capability to identify one’s own benefit partner, dropping the Ideal, remains a rare and only human achievement, that is logical and economical at the same time.

               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio, the Monday after Easter -Aprile 13, 2020.

P.S. Thanks are due for the materials offered : ‘Fondazione Nivola’ established at Orani in 1990 on the joint initiative of Regione Sardegna, Municipality of Orani and of the artist’s family with the aim of promoting awareness of Costantino Nivòla and other contemporary artists’ works/ www.museonivola.it and ‘Biblioteca Comunale’ of Biassono-MB, Italy.

[1] “Born In The USA” (1984), is a rock song by the U.S.A. author and singer Bruce Springsteen.

[2]  Cited from : “Un uomo che ha domani”, ‘Opera Omnia di Giacomo B. Contri’ 2015, Sezione ‘Saggi, testi pro-manuscripto’ pag. 12

[3] “Alla periferia del Paradiso. Il ‘Disegno ininterrotto’ da Salvatore Fancello a Costantino Nivola”, by Roberto Cassanelli – Jaca Book Wide 2003. I thank  the ‘Biblioteca comunale’ of Biassono-MB, Italy for this precious volume.

[4] Cited from : “Fancello 1942”, by M. Labò : it is a certificate of the ‘Scuola di Avviamento professionale’ in Dorgali.

[5] Cited from : “Alla periferia del Paradiso. Il ‘Disegno ininterrotto’ da Salvatore Fancello a Costantino Nivola”, by Roberto Cassanelli – Jaca Book Wide 2003/ Lettera al cognato Simeone Lai, 1935.

[6] In 1988, when Costantino died, Ruth Nivola gave ‘Disegno ininterrotto’ to the Municipality of Dorgali , where now can be admired at the ‘Civica Sala Fancello’.

[7] Carl Gustav Jung moved away from Sigmund Freud’s work, after the 1909 travel to the United States, made together with Freud himself and the Colleagues psychoanalists Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sàndor Ferenczi on invitation of the ‘Clark University’ for a cycle of conferences.

[8] Not so easy to define, the ‘Modernism’ emerged, as a cultural stream and movement, between the end of XIX and the beginning of the XX century, together with the urbanization process which made obsolete many canons of the bourgeois society of the beginning of XIX century : it proposed  itself also as revolutionary compared to the first capitalism and, in a sense, simplifier of its istances. It had to deal with the devastations of the two World Wars.

[9] Pablo Picasso in 1949 visited at Marsille the ‘Unitè d’Habitation’, public housing projected by Le Corbusier with the characteristics of that architectural Modernisme he named ‘machine à habiter’.

[10] “L’espace indicible”, 1946 in “L’architecture d’aujourd’hui”, November – December special issue, cited in ”Le Corbusier. Lessons in Modernism”, Catalog of the exhibition held at Orani (Nuoro, Sardinia) 2018 December – 2019 March  and at care of Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Richard Ingersoll, Marida Talamona.

[11] In “Un uomo che ha domani”, ‘Opera Omnia di Giacomo B.Contri’ 2015 – Sezione ‘Saggi, testi pro-manuscripto’ the author and psychoanalist Giacomo B. Contri takes up the figures of pathological diseconomics : ‘emerging damage’, ‘ceasing benefit’ to which he adds a third figure, ‘non emerging benefit’ (pg.19).

This dress, designed and made by Alice Gariboldi, is inspired by Leonardo flight studies, who today is very much appreciated by youngest people for his wide interests and his own capacity of technical achievements that still remain forerunners. But the intuition of this Project is also in having been able to grasp the anguish of Leonardo himself towards an inhuman perfection, which however he persisted in pursuing in an even growing independence in his relationships.

Curator of the exhibition is Dr. Simona Gallo, ‘Area Giuridico Pedagogica’s authority of ‘Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia’ at ‘Milano Bollate, II Casa di Reclusione – Area III F1’, who could get and promote the wish, born among a few young prisoners, for a specific Project.

One can marvel nowadays at the entrepreneurial ability, when we are weakened by short-sighted chronicles rebound striking our pages at unsustainable speeds.

As a matter of facts we are surprised indeed by this Project which took off in prison, the ‘II Casa di Reclusione’ of ‘Milano Bollate’, where a few young prisoners could think of, propose, plan and make – also capable to collect consent and collaboration, the ‘Teatro della Moda’[2], Milan municipality, ‘Palazzo Morando’[3], the textile industry Ratti Spa[4] generosity other than a number of established stylists’ – 30 evening dresses inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’ main and most known inventions, as he lived in Milan in the most fruitful years of his own life, whose Milan commemorated in 2019 the 500° anniversary from his death.

With today’s issue a series of short presentations starts of those dresses exposed at Palazzo Morando from December 11, 2019 to January 5, 2020 and for which a public auction sale has been prepared, whose proceeds will go to the benefit of V.I.D.A.S.[5] for free assistance to children with incurable diseases : at the end of these introductions, a more detailed report will be published, thanks to the availability of whom, despite serving a prison sentence, could think of, propose and take care of the Project until its realization.

Opens my review the very dress inspired by the longest, deep studies by Leonardo Da Vinci about the technique of birds flight : as a matter of facts he liked to deepen what he soon became convinced of, that is that the flight is a mechanical phenomenon due to a wing stroke in the air, nothing of mysterious and then that also men could fly, getting wings.

Author of the dress is Alice Gariboldi, student at the ‘Il Teatro della Moda’, and this is how she described her creation for the exhibition.

“…Leonardo reserves an extensive and detailed research to the study of the wing, which evolves over the years. After a number of researches, he seems to lean towards a wing type ‘with doors’ like that of a bat, which is divided into three zones and for which he foresees the use of different naterials… One of the last machines designed by the artist adopts a wing type completely different, with a skeleton similar to that of a hand…

Composed by three pieces (the dress I created – editor’s note) would like to remember the paper on which the notes were written, and also the most used materials by Leonardo, such as wood, the starched linen and cotton.

The colours used are the ones which remember the paper, starting with yellow up to the off-white, made using natural dyes, such the black tea and curcuma.

The high-waisted pants end at mid-calf, have pockets on the knees and on the sides.

The bodice, inspired by a skecth of a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci that portrays Isabella d’Este includes a special closure composed of laces so that it can support the wings on which the notes on flight will be reproduced.

The wings, composed of a wooden structure, have the particularity of being able to open and close…”

                                                                        Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - February 1, 2020

[1] “Leonardo prigioniero del volo” is the collective Fashion exhibition just ended in Milan, in which stylists, designers, model makers and painters participated in the creation of thirty original evening dresses inspired by the Leonardo Da Vinci inventions.

[2] “Teatro della Moda – Italian Fashion Institute & Lab”, Advanced tailoring School based in Milan, immediately offered a generous collaboration  to the project, with also a specific training into the prison of Milano Bollate.

[3] “Raccolte storiche Palazzo Morando – Costume, moda, immagine”,  is in Milan, Via Sant’Andrea n°6.

[4] Ratti Spa, a prestigious Italian textile industry based at Guanzate (Como), provided the fabrics and materials for all the dresses produced by the young prisoners of ‘Milano Bollate’.

[5] V.I.D.A.S.is an Association of already 37 years of activity, operating in Milan, Monza and 112 Municipalities in the two Cities and offering free and continuous assistance to incurable patients : the proceeds of the auction sale of the evening dresses made for the exhibition will be donated to the charity of the ‘Casa Sollievo Bimbi’ at V.I.D.A.S., first children’s hospice in Lombardia, opened in May 2019.

Antonello Da Messina.

One of the original note-book by Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, presented at the exhibition of ‘Palazzo Reale’ in Milan, here with the reconstruction which allowed the art critic to attribute with certainty the "San Girolamo nello studio" (1474-1475) to Antonello Da Messina. The enlargement of details from Antonello’s Da Messina works and now being at the exhibition of ‘Palazzo Reale’ in Milan, are by the ‘Centro di Ateneo di Arti visive’ of the ‘Università degli Studi’ of Bergamo.

With the loving gaze of a son who proved himself, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa(1) did care the exhibition now being at ‘Palazzo Reale’, and named after Antonello Da Messina.

We are very interested in following the thinking of this cultured and passionate Curator, as he realized and got that special love that surrounded the master Antonello, not a ‘massive’ love indeed nor shouting but clearly perceptible at his contemporaries – we don’t refer only to Jacobello, Antonello’s son who finished and signed the magnificent "Madonna col Bambino", just sketched by his father, who was dead one year before : " 1480 XIII Mesis Decebris / Jacobus Anto.lli filiu no / humani pictoris me fecit(2)".

As a matter of fact, of Antonello Da Messina it can be said that he knew how to move in the real, while he knew thoroughly the reality itself.

Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa so introduces in this special exhibition someone who, four centuries after, at the end of '800 acted as a son who cares with passion and patience to reconstruct a hidden heritage which was proving not only to be unvaluable, but also indispensable to understand the novelty of the Renaissance and its future weakness too…

It’s about Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, passionate historian and a qualified critic who was able to recover and inventory mostly of the Sicilian painter’s surviving paintings, as survivors to earthquakes and floods or stolen too, or even covered and to someone else falsely attributed (3).  The exhibition places ahead the work of the man – i.e. both of the painter and of the historian-critic – instead the final object which would risk to end into a collector’s bulimia.

Several works by Antonello Da Messina were destroyed in the 1693 earthquake in Sicily. Then the 1860 flood wiped away even the Antonello’s humble tomb, at the Friars Minor church "Santa Maria del Gesù" where he himself, surprising his fellowes citizens, called to be buried. And already in life he had aroused astonishment, marrying in 1455 Giovanna Cuminella, widowed with the daughter Caterinella so that he could buy a dowry for her, even financially committing himself.

Giorgio Vasari dedicated a biography-romance to Antonello Da Messina in his "Vite" (1550-1568), indicating him as the one who bewitched 'Giovanni Da Brugia', i.e. the excellent Flemish Jan van Eyck from whom Antonello would have received the secret of oil painting. Cavalcaselle so was able to understand that, after staying at van Eyck until he died, Antonello didn’t immediately come back to Messina, from which he had suddenly leaved stopping his good worksop business but, as a matter of fact, he moved to Venice with all his family.

And right in his Sicily, governed by Alfonso D’Aragona and the nerve centre of Europe in 1430 both for trade and culture, Antonello knew those excellent technicians works who were the Flemish artists for the Art to come. Suddenly he had decided to go and meet them in person, with the invincible charge of a wise intuition.

Around 1860 Cavalcaselle - who previously had been entrusted by a London publisher to carry out field researches for a critical edition of “Le vite” but the job proved too big to handle – received a new assignment from the Ministry of Education to draw up a Catalog of the church-owned works of art in Umbria and Marche : the historian could build a large inventory which deserved him the appellation of Vasari work ‘continuer’.

Really provided of an exceptional visual memory as well as an excellent draftsman, Cavalcaselle suceeded in attribute with certainty to Antonello Da Messina a number of works which seemed vanished or fakes, and as a consequence he literally traveled on foot or by mule for kilometres and kilometres between Museums, private and public Art Galleries and Churches, animated by a sincere passion which still today would excite us.

His own notebooks, full of strokes taken from Antonello’s works which he could easily link to those of other authors who met or had been working with the master and become little at a time his own ‘navigator’, allowed Cavalcaselle to reconstruct and at last to locate the routes made by Antonello even out Italy bounds(4), as well as the works carried out over the years but now obscured by the rough of forgery and oblivion.

In the path suggested by the exhibition we suddenly face "L'Annunciata"(5), taken up by Antonello at the end of 'meritatio'(6) when Mary, overcome the fear and perplexity of an announcement of which she offers to us only the certain elements – i.e. she herself and the book opened at the page she was reading – she ‘thinks’ possible the real she guess and she receive it.

Maybe the first woman in paintings History, this young Sicilian lady can allow herself to approve her own intuition – or project we don’t know : her innocence and glance with satisfaction don’t let any doubt. Not at all we face an ‘angelic woman’ of the ‘courtly’ tradition(7) and that causes the comparison with “The Virgin reading” (1460) (8) which has a well distinct Flemish flavour even in the melancholic transparence of her face and is light years away from this innovative Madonna.

We can wonder what happened in the refined thought of the Sicilian master who, overcoming his own aesthetic talent and technical skill, attributed with unsuspected vigour and already at the end of his career, to a well connoted face and also recognizable maybe, that intelligent and imputative look, even with a nod of veiled satisfaction which he so often portrayed only on virile faces(9).

However Antonello’s devoted fidelity dedicates to Christ a completely different register, and to the many interpretations that see him suffering, caught in the sudden temptation of having been abandoned by Father...(10)

Perhaps much still remains to be investigated into Antonello Da Messina’s work because he - in the early turbulent Renaissance in which he lived – was already able to wonder if the absurd guilt indeed of which Christ was accused, wasn’t his own fault of kneeling in front of the woman he didn’t knew. (11).

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 30, 2019 

1. Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (Torino, 1971) is teacher of ‘Storia dell’Arte Moderna e Museologia’ at the Faculty of ‘Scienze Umanistiche’ at the ‘Università degli Studi’ of Bergamo, where he is director of the ‘Centro di Ateneo di Arti Visive’. He is art historian and Art and History consultant at the ‘Direzione dei Musei Civici di Vicenza e Conservatoria dei Pubblici Monumenti’. He cared for the ‘Scuderie del Quirinale’ in Rome the exhibtions : ‘Antonello da Messina’ (2006), ‘Giovanni Bellini’ (2008), ‘Lorenzo Lotto’ (2011), ‘Tintoretto’ (2012), ‘Tiziano’ (2013) e ‘Antonello da Messina, pittore non umano’ a Palermo (2018), now being at Milan until the next June 2. He personally cared exhibitions at Bruxelles, Moscow and Paris. He published for Einaudi ‘Venezia, l’altro Rinascimento’ (PBE Arte, 2014).
2. “1480 del mese di dicembre, Jacobo figlio di Antonello, pittore non umano mi fece”, is the autograph reported down on the right on the label of ‘Madonna col Bambino’ at the ‘Accademia Carrara’ of Bergamo.
3. Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, Italian historian and critic, participated in the Revolution of 1848 and for that he was condemned to death by the Austrians, he run away from ‘Lombardo-Veneto Realm’ to Rome where he fighted under the leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini. After the fall of the ‘Repubblica Romana’, he took refuge in England, working as an excellent draftman and restorer in the ‘Select Committee’ of the National Gallery in London. He expressed doubts on the traditional attribution, he imputed without hesitation the work ‘San Girolamo nello studio’ to Antonello da Messina and between 1857 and 1861 he came back to Italy where the political situation had become favourable again.
4. In 1476, called by Leonardo Da Vinci to the Court of Galeazzo Sforza, enlightened but intemperant Duke of Milan, Antonello Da Messina preferred to remain in Venice where he already was working : a few months after, when in December of the same year Galeazzo was killed due to a conspiracy of noble men with consequent dramatic turmoils in the town, Antonello came back directly to Sicily.
5. The work (1475-1476) is permanently located at ‘Palazzo Abatellis’ in Palermo.
6. ‘Meritatio’ is the fourth moment, ending the ‘L’Annunciazione’ and preceeded by : ‘conturbatio’, ‘interrogatio’, humiliatio’.
7. ‘Court woman’, or ‘Court lady’ from  Latin ‘domina’. She’s the woman sung in the romances of ‘courtly love’ in France, from where it spread starting from the XII century as a reaction to the social rigidity of customs : she’s the woman whose beauty blinds the man who submits to her without any reward, an ecstasies indeed.
8. Dated 1460 and attributed to Antonello da Messina, ‘The Virgin reading’ is in Milan, at the ‘Museo Poldi Pezzoli’.
9. First of all I think of the ‘Portrait of a young man’ (1473-1474), London – The National Gallery; but also of the ‘Portrait of a man - Trivulzio Portrait’, (1476) Turin – ‘Palazzo Madama’, ‘Museo Civico d’Arte Antica’.
10. ‘Ecce homo’ (1475), Piacenza – ‘Collegio Alberoni’; ‘Ecce homo’ (1468-1470), Genoa – ‘Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola’; ‘Cristo alla colonna’ (1478) Paris, ‘Musèe du Louvre’.
11. Thanks to prof. Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa at whom I could listen in the introduction of last April the 11th, at the ‘Sant’Andrea Apostolo’ church at Bergamo Alta, on invitation received by the parish Don Giovanni Gusmini. And afterwards I’ve listened him in Milan, during his own introduction at ‘Palazzo Reale’ lasto May the 4th.

The effectiveness of beauty in reality.

Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (5).

“What the beauty is I don’t know… There isn’t one that is not susceptible to further refinement…”[2]

Dürer was not an isolated genius but a cultured man, well introduced in the German society from which, however he could take distance with that refined expertise which made him a reliable interlocutor of those powerful patrons who called him, and without attracting the distrust which instead his contemporary Leonardo Da Vinci surrounded himself.

Son of the goldsmith Albrecht, named ‘the Elder’[3], since childhood Dürer was an excellent draftsman and with a keen talent for portraiture : soonest he began to cooperate wth scholars and printers in the nascent and promising editorial environment in Nuremberg, until he decided to switch to the difficult – and impressive – art of engraving, to which he would even entrusted the fold of the face of a mocked Christ in ‘Passion’ (1497-1510), and also the perverse shades of envy on the men in ‘Christ at twelve among the Doctors’ (1506).

However it was the religious question of that period, between the emerging Protestant Reformation – maybe launched by a loan of the Fugger Family to the Archduke of Tyrol in 1487, granted by a mortgage on the silver mine of the Archduke – and the following Counter-Reformation, which started in Dürer man a question not to be disregarded, the one of a unique individual thinking, not divisible between rationalism and mysticism, uniqueness that is removed only through short-sightedness, making the human turn pale into a rigid servile dull mechanicalness which, shifting and shifting, will be culminating into the Nazi insanity of a few decades ago.

It is a most severe criticism by Dürer, even is well-educated, hardly counterable due to its captivating sophistication, against the German and contemporaries artists, first of them the brilliant politician Lucas Cranach, piainter of Reformation and friend of Martin Lutero with whom Dürer was cooperating at the beginning. Just look at the different interpretations of St. Jerome, a model for the humanists at the crossroads between Protestants and Catholics.

The art of Dürer came to face the art of our Leonardo Da Vinci, for whom the old age of St. Jerome was only penance and loneliness, while Dürer was describing a saint and smiling old man, gladly aware.

In his own loyalty to the classsic canons, re-examined thanks to the rediscovery of artists like the painter Apelle, named by Plinius the Elder as capable to reproduce visually sounds and scents, Dürer enjoys the extraordinary individuals painted by Giorgione, Tiziano, Lotto and by Leonardo Da Vinci himself building in turn on the excellent Italian Colleagues’ achievements. He’s prepared the ‘Renaissance’ indeed, through his proverbial curiosity towards a real he deemed reliable even in his own old age, and in the effort of life that can always be processed.

At last he landed to his most puzzling work, “Melencholia” of 1511, where the leading character is the artist himself, as a processor of reality, without any other satisfaction than the work itself and the work in progress indeed. Dürer daringly themes the artist ‘fury’ as he can investigate the desorder of the world coming even to establish an order[4] thanks to the tools of logic at his disposal, but then he is alone when anticipates his contemporaries concluding a work that is inviting, for the world itself wants and is disposed to it, even if is still a project and not yet an experienceable reality.

Loneliness breeds ‘melencholy’ Dürer suggests, while pointing out the risks of a modern Ideal of sexual autonomy, already present in the authors of ‘Reformation’.

The liking of Dürer for the perfect monstrosity of “ Marine crab” (1495) which lets be admired without resistance is that of a curious man and fond of reality, not contaminated by prejudices but attentive student of the classic and measurable canons.

It is the same liking which you find again in “The satyr family”(1505), a ‘faun’ as wild as tender husband as well as a caring father in a quite different family compared to that where the educational rigour forges indeed risky weaknesses and inhibitions ready to explode.

Finally, it is an application sympathy, the one focusing the mistrustful judgement of Dürer towards an emerging social submission in Europe – favoured by the Culture of the contemporary ‘Reformation’ by Martin Lutero, to whom however Dürer will approach in the last years of his life – ready to generate real monsters, pale and lucid executors of anything they don’t share nor love, hating the even mild individuality of a child when he asks questions to which the adult has given up answering.

                                 Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – September 8, 2018

[1] I owe the discovery of Albrecht Dürer (Nurberg 1471-1528) to a welcome surprise by my daughter : the visit to the exhibition in Milan “Dürer ed il Rinascimento fra Germania ed Italia” (a cura di B. Aikema) at ‘Palazzo Reale’ (February 21 – June 24, 2018).   

[2] “Dürer”, edited by Costantino Porcu – Rizzoli Editore Milano (2004)

[3] It is of 1490 the “Portrait of Albrecht Dürer, the Elder”.

[4] “Ordine, contrordine, disordine. La ragione dopo Freud”, Maria Delia Contri – SIC Edizioni (2016) : the author specifically deals the theme of ‘disorder’ which precedes and supports any psychopathology.

(5) Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.