Pietro Lucano Biography
Pietro Lucano known as Piero (Venice, 8 May 1878 – Trieste, 14 October 1972) was an Italian painter, architect and writer. Director of the Artistic Club of Trieste during the 1900s. He was born in Trieste on 8 May 1878, the eldest son of Pietro Giovanni, a Venetian Garibaldino, tailor by profession, and Elisabetta Tauschel, Austrian, embroiderer, who had two other children. Family events will profoundly influence the artist's life. Very precocious, already at the age of nine, he reproduced house facades to scale. He began his artistic training under the guidance of E. Scomparini, at the Industrial School for Art Leaders in Trieste. During his adolescence he approached art in a city, where the artistic circle began to coagulate around established masters, such as Giacomo de Simon, of whom he was a student and a promising young man. Trieste in those years was an important center of the culture of the Habsburg empire, where art exhibitions were very frequent and artistic influences from beyond the Alps blended with Venetian culture. Later he enrolled in the Academies of Venice, under the guidance of Ettore Tito, from whom he drew his predilection for portraits and the reproduction of landscapes. In these years the painter loved to paint en plein air, and did not fail to practice by copying the works of various masters. He is admitted on merit to the third year of the academy and every year receives the honor as best student. At the end of his studies he received the Cavos prize, honoring his benefactors, Eng. Geiringer and Baron Sartorio, for whom he painted portraits. During the last years of the century, Lucano was in Munich, where he became friends with Ruggero Rovan, and frequented the studio of the Bohemian Azbe. Here he had the opportunity to get to know the school from beyond the Alps, of which he appreciated above all the lyrical sense of the landscape and the search for particular luministic effects. Precisely in Munich, the Superintendent of the Royal Theater offered him the position of "court painter" and set designer, requiring, however, that he renounce his Italian citizenship to fill that position. The father, an old Garibaldian, had already extracted the promise from his children to remain Italian, even within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. The painter asked for two months to reflect, but the sudden death of his father and the complex affairs of his sister Amelia called the painter back to Trieste to assume his duties as head of the family. Sister's children, orphaned, adopted. Because of this, the painter will never leave his hometown again. Returning to Trieste, he began to paint landscapes and city views and, in the 1910s, he also created decorations for important buildings, such as the Synagogue and the Central Fish Market. The clash-encounter, which occurs in recent years, between German and Italian painting, particularly Venetian, subsides in the Trieste painters, in the sign of a Central European culture, where Trieste is the center of confluence of the experience of great artists and literati. In these years, different elements converged in Lucano's painting, leading him both to attempt the secessionist adventure and to assimilate traits of a futurist flavour. During the Great War, he was drafted, fell seriously ill and spent the war period in the Veneto region, in Strà. He moved to Rho in 1918, where he worked in the technical office of the "Lombard Chemical Society", creating drawings of boilers, pipes, floor plans..., returning to the perfectionism he had cultivated in the Trieste architectural studios. In this period he painted many Venetian landscapes, but also Trieste views. In 1920 he founded an “Artistic Consulting Studio”. The purposes can be translated into the concept of "Assisting a person in the examination and solution of an art question that interests him at that moment". The questions mainly concern architecture and its derivations and integrations (applied, decorative, industrial arts, furniture...). The firm is aimed above all at owners and administrators, to find specific solutions in the reforms of buildings, public buildings and shop premises. In these years, however, Lucano painted a lot, experimenting with all genres of composition, always faithful to his canons: "there must be no genres of painting, such as landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, horses, etc. but rather graphic verses, colouristic concerts, harmonies of forms, poems for the eyes, painted songs". The twenty years from the 1920s to the 1940s were a period of fruitful work for the artist, he was president of the Trieste Artistic Club, and participated in many national and international exhibitions, enjoying many successes. After 1920, he continued to work intensely as a decorator. He revisits oriental art by placing exotic-shaped vases in his still lifes. In the 1930s he dedicated himself to portraiture. In this period he painted portraits of his daughter Bianca and personalities from Trieste. The portrait called "The Mirror" is from this period, of clear Parisian ancestry, where the rapid strokes of light on the hands and face focus on the contrast between the diaphanous beauty of the face and the roughness of the hair of the dress. He paints various landscapes in which he always favors the sunset or the dawn. Three experiments date back to 1933, which present a panorama of destruction and death: overturned buildings, uprooted tree trunks, tragic skies, with unnatural perspectives, almost as if to presage the tragedies of the following decade. In this period he also worked on the creation of some posters in the field of posters, playing in pastel tones. His great skill as a designer and portraitist allowed him to create nudes of great beauty towards the end of this period, where the nude merges with the environment that surrounds it. During the war period, Lucano completely abandoned the furniture and decoration sector and dedicated himself only to painting landscapes and the horrors of war, which were the central themes of this troubled historical period. In this period the paintings are inspired by feelings of pity towards the people affected by inevitable events: the shipwrecked, mutilated and killed or the farmers fleeing from the horrors of war. The portraits of the war period are inspired by an even more marked adherence to reality: the wrinkled face emerging from the darkness of his brother Carlo, the thin and thoughtful physiognomy of Bice Polli, the decisive features of the American Colonel Bowman. The painting that symbolically closes this artistic period dates back to 1950: "The Light of the World", an immense cross, taken from behind, on which Christ shines equally on the victims and executioners. Since the 1950s he has been part of many artistic juries and dedicated himself to the restoration of the city's artistic monuments. In this period he resumed his literary activity and published “I dialoghetti” and “I Versi in triestin”. He continually argues about the city's architectural arrangements, considered extemporaneous, and also about the Venetian biennials, for which he proposes an innovative regulation. He deals with the restoration of some ancient works, and in this period he reworks his theories on cuneiform writing, which for simplicity of concepts and expressive means, he would like to be resurrected. In the years between 1950 and his death he continued to paint assiduously; the themes dear to him are always the landscapes around Trieste, of the Carso, of Basovizza, where he spends long periods during the summer. In this period he painted two self-portraits, which is the last image he left of himself, now almost eighty years old. In the autumn of 1966, Lucano presented a personal exhibition of 70 people portrayed throughout his life in the headquarters of the artistic club of Trieste; the search for the psyche reveals in these faces a push that makes form coincide with internal reality. He died in Trieste on 14 October 1972.
