An unpublished Benvenuto Benvenuti on display at the Collesalvetti Art Gallery

Until May 16, 2024, the Pinacoteca Comunale “Carlo Servolini” in Collesalvetti is dedicating an exhibition to one of the most important Italian artists of the early 20th century, Benvenuto Benvenuti (Livorno, 1881 - 1959), with the aim of probing a particular aspect of his production. The exhibition Benvenuto Benvenuti: the architect and the landscape painter. Twinned transparencies of initiatory symbols between Art Nouveau, Utopia and pantheism, curated by Francesca Cagianelli, is in fact the first exhibition ever dedicated exclusively to Benvenuto Benvenuti’s drawing and engraving production, capable of displaying rarities of considerable stylistic and documentary value.

The exhibition, which is ideally placed as a new chapter in a series of exhibitions that began with Dans le noir. Charles Doudelet and Symbolism in Livorno (Sept. 30, 2021-Jan. 20, 2022), and continued with La Beata Riva. Gino Romiti and Spiritualism in Livorno. Protagonists and Cenacles between the School of Guglielmo Micheli, Caffè Bardi and Bottega d’Arte (October 5, 2022 - February 16, 2023) and with Serafino Macchiati: Moi et l’autre. The Frontiers of Impressionism between Belle Epoque Euphoria and Dramas of the Psyche (Nov. 9, 2023 - Feb. 29, 2024), it intends to continue the mission of the Pinacoteca Comunale Carlo Servolini, devoted to the reevaluation of the visionary and esoteric strand of Labronica figurative culture between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Also present in the exhibition itinerary is the considerable nucleus of unpublished drawings preserved at Fondazione Livorno-from the donation of Giuseppe Argentieri-selected as a preview for the Collesalvetti exhibition occasion, which confirm the artist’s prolonged reflection in the margins of the Art Nouveau linearism metabolized during his apprenticeship at the Quarti firm, Secessionist decorativism (from Joseph Hoffman to Joseph Olbrich) and the visionary utopia of the so-called “architectes idéistes” of the late nineteenth century-primarily François Garas ( 1866 - 1925), Gabriel Guillemonat (1866-1945), and Henri Provensal (1868 - 1934)-and then landed on that Romantic conception ofneo-Gothic architecture launched by Friedrich Schlegel, which pushed him toward“ developments and theories of a more unusual crystallized music,” to the point of devising veritable “gemlike quilts of initiatory symbols” (Viezzoli 1942).

The exhibition continues the documentary and historiographical sounding of national and international latitude that began in Livorno territory with the pioneering exhibition Benvenuto Benvenuti. Dal vero al Simbolo (Livorno, Museo Civico “Giovanni Fattori,” Villa Mimbelli, October 4, 2001-January 6, 2002), curated by Segio Rebora, and with Giuseppe Argentieri’s volume, Benvenuto Benvenuti. Words in Freedom. Scattered Pages, Reflections and Poems (Pontedera 2024), which are to be considered milestones in the historiographical revision of the cultural and figurative Livorno temperament of the first two decades of the 20th century. Thus, they play to the advantage of the identification of a hegemonic role of Benvenuto Benvenuti in the entourage of the so-called “left” of Leghorn art, as much as the’exclusive channel of communication undertaken with Vittore Grubicy, as much as the association established with Charles Doudelet and, finally, the strategic friendship cultivated with one of the most significant “Italiens de Paris,” such as the just celebrated Serafino Macchiati.

Consecrated already in the 1920s, coinciding with some prestigious exhibition initiatives, in the terms of a sort of initiatory mentor of a spiritualistic and elitist aesthetic, Benvenuti will be classified by the scholar Gustavo Pierotti Della Sanguigna in the terms of “Architect Painter,” whose “House of Meditation” is configured as a privileged destination of visionary ardors, where “the feeling of the vanity of this transitory world and of its transient living will certainly still find heroic and calm accords, in grace to which, the strengthened soul will abandon itself with serene joy to the attractions of the mystery of the abyss.” It would be Valentino Piccoli, a Neapolitan journalist and writer, an adept, like Pierotti Della Sanguigna and Benvenuti himself, of Vittore Grubicy’s verb, who in 1933, between the lines of the introduction to the catalog of the artist’s solo exhibition, published by Officine Grafiche C. Chiappini, Benvenuti’s stylistic parabola in the key of “an immediate spiritual intuition,” as in the case of “Templum Artis” and, above all, of the “House of the Geometrician,” defined the latter as a “singular transcendental enigma, in which the plastic and linear essence of geometric forms is expressed, which constitute the rhythm and substratum of the sensitive aspects of creation.”

Following in the exhibition’s path are the first ever dedicated exclusively to Benvenuto Benvenuti’s drawing and engraving production, rarities of extraordinary stylistic and documentary value, such as the two watercolor sketches depicted in the postcards sent in 1918 to Maria Stella Benvenuti (one of which Benvenuti himself identified in the terms of “A carpet model,” but to be considered a true digression in the margin of Klimtian decorativism) as well as unpublished photographic evidence intended to support the hypothesis of a further expansion of the catalog of the artist’s hitherto known architectural drawings.

Among the most dramatic outcomes of Benvenuti’s pantheistic iconography, the Colligiana exhibition features one of the masterpieces entitled The Wheel of the Mill (c. 1924) shown in the 2001/2002 monograph, poised between naturalistic representation, Symbolist substrate and spectral projection, dramatized by Rembrandtian and Caravaggesque auras, so much so as to evoke “the allegory of a desperate soul, of one who, meditating on self-suppression, places his foot on the razor’s edge between life and death.”

Crowning this one of iconographic and archival documentation, still unpublished and still largely elusive in its links to the theoretical and philosophical movements of European esotericism, is the centrality of the esoteric incunabulum, La Clèf des Grands Mystères, 1861 (transl. it. “The Key to the Great Mysteries,” Atanor), by French esotericist Alphonse Louis Constant, also known by the pseudonym Éliphas Lévi.

The exhibition has free admission. For all information on hours and openings call 0586 980251 or visit the Servolini Art Gallery Facebook page.

An unpublished Benvenuto Benvenuti on display at the Collesalvetti Art Gallery

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