Luigi Bartolini Biography
Luigi Bartolini (Cupramontana, 8 February 1892 – Rome, 16 May 1963) was an Italian engraver, painter, writer and poet. Born in Cupramontana on 8 February 1892, he is considered, together with Giorgio Morandi and Giuseppe Viviani, among the greatest Italian engravers of the twentieth century. Trained at the Academy of Rome, his first etchings date back to 1914. His style is linked to the Italian naturalist tradition of the nineteenth century while looking at the prints of Rembrandt, Goya, Telemaco Signorini, Giovanni Fattori and the engravers of the Italian eighteenth century. He participated, upon invitation, both as an engraver and as a painter in almost all editions of the Venice Biennale from 1928 to 1962, receiving the prize for engraving in 1942. For engraving he was awarded in Florence in 1932 with Morandi and Umberto Boccioni (to memory), in 1935 at the Quadrennial in Rome and in 1950 in Lugano. In 1933 he was arrested for political reasons in Osimo, where he had been living for a few years, by the fascist regime with whom he had also had relations. After a month in prison in Ancona he was confined first to Montefusco and then to Merano where he remained until 1938. According to Luciano Troisio, one of his biographers, it was a "trial and a farce confinement": because "The anti-fascism of Bartolini is strange to say the least, given that the real anti-fascists were in prison, reduced to impotence, silence, and in any case derided, and they certainly didn't have, like Bartolini, entire pages of fascist magazines at their disposal, all their work distributed, the engravings reproduced , the published poems, the narrative works reviewed by the party bodies and advertised, were not received by the minister Bottai to "argue in good manners, with brotherly affection", as Bottai himself wrote on 1 August 1932 from his holiday home in Frascati" (Troisio, "L'amoroso detective", 1979; see p. 130 et seq.). In short: "Frankly, fascism treated Bartolini with kid gloves", concludes the Paduan scholar. The opinion of the "Paduno biographer", however, starts from an incorrect assumption: that Luigi Bartolini professed to be anti-fascist. In reality, the artist has always defined himself as an anarchist, or rather "celestial anarchist", interested only in art and not in politics. In fact, Bartolini does not appear among the intellectuals who signed, in 1925, the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, promoted by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, with which the numerous signatories guaranteed support and approval for the regime. (Among the signatories are poets and writers such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luigi Pirandello, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Curzio Malaparte, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ardengo Soffici). An interesting summary of the complex relationship between Luigi Bartolini and Fascism can be found in the book “Mino Rosi and Luigi Bartolini, an intellectual partnership”. “The story of the disturbing frictions and stormy clashes between Luigi Bartolini and Fascism could constitute a dossier of many pages. The first but already decisive episode of the dense catalog of ostracisms, censorships, interdictions that he had to suffer due above all to his overtly critical writings towards not so much the political institution itself, but towards the hierarchies of the regime and their intellectual lackeys, was in 1933 the accusation of maintaining "secret epistolary relations with the exiles" read Lionello Venturi (who, moreover, had sold him a group of etchings in Paris). This first cost him the withdrawal of his party card, then his arrest and imprisonment in the prisons of Ancona and his subsequent confinement in Montefusco, near Avellino. Mussolini then exchanged the confinement for a transfer to Merano, as a political guard. What followed was a chain of actions and reactions: bans on newspapers from publishing his writings, seizures of books (and destruction: see Writings of exception, Il Campano, 1942, ed.), closures of exhibitions and so on. In 1945 Bartolini recounted his odyssey in a pamphlet (Why do I shade, Stampa Novografica, Rome 1945, ed.) composed of rapid quotations of testimonies and documents on his past as a persecuted dissident, almost an identity card or an unequivocal letter of credentials to take once again polemically position in the new climate, not without mystifications, of the post-war period". (See N. Micieli, Mino Rosi and Luigi Bartolini, an intellectual partnership. Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra, 1998). L'Unità also provided a brief but significant testimony to the moral stature of Luigi Bartolini on 28 January 2002 with an intervention signed by Raul Wittenberg: "Dear Director, I would also like to remember, on Remembrance Day, a person thanks to whom my family, Jews from Königsberg, was able to avoid martyrdom in the Nazi camps after fleeing Hitler's Germany. This is Luigi Bartolini, who passed away forty years ago (…). In that terrible winter of 1944, one afternoon my father was warned that the next day he would be picked up with his partner by the Gestapo. We never knew who wanted to warn us. The fact is that my parents gathered a few things and fled to the nearby house of an anti-fascist acquaintance who had promised hospitality if they were discovered. But no one answered his desperate pressing on the doorbell. It was getting dark, the curfew was approaching, my parents decided to try with the Maestro. Bartolini not only opened the door immediately, but together with Mrs. Anita welcomed my parents and kept them hidden in the house for over a week, just enough time to organize their escape from Rome. And Bartolini did it at his own risk (…). After many years, driven by the wave of racism and anti-Semitism that seems to emerge in the current political situation, I felt the need to publicly pay homage to the memory of a just man (...). (See l'Unità, 28 January 2002, page 29 national section Comments). Also in the period 1949-1950 he created, together with a self-portrait, Le reapers for the important Verzocchi collection in Forlì, now in the Civic Art Gallery of that city. He was present at all the most important artistic events of his time, developing different manners defined by himself: "blonde", "black" and "linear" manner, with these methods he created numerous etchings with: landscapes of the Marche and Sicily and the series: Insects, Butterflies, Birds, and Hunting Scenes. His activity as a writer, poet, art critic and polemicist is also noteworthy, with over 70 books published with the major publishing houses, including Vallecchi, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Longanesi and Nistri Lischi. He was a collaborator of the main Italian magazines and newspapers: Il Selvaggio, Il Frontespizio, Quadrivio, Maestrale, Corriere della Sera, Il Borghese, La Fiera Letteraria, Il Resto del Carlino, Il Gazzettino. Few know that the Corrente magazine takes its name from an indication by Luigi Bartolini. In 1946 he published the novel Bicycle Thieves for the Polin publisher of Rome, from which Cesare Zavattini drew inspiration for the screenplay of the film of the same name by Vittorio De Sica. In 1960 he was appointed Academician of San Luca. In 1965 a retrospective was dedicated to him as part of the IX Quadrennial in Rome.
