PAOLO GESTRI
MANLIO CANCOGNI
BERT W. MEIJER
UMBERTO BALDINI
RAFFAELLA DE GRADA
ELENA LOMBARDO
ANTONIO PAOLUCCI
LUISA BECHERUCCI
MASSIMO DI VOLO
PIER FRANSCESCO MARCUCCI
ROBERTO SALVINI
RAFFAELLO BERTOLI
RODOLFO GATTAI
MILENA MILANI
PIER CARLO SANTINI

GLAUCO CAMBON 1987

The Art of Roberto Panichi With Roberto Panichi's illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, the William Benton Museum of Art has made a significant acquisition. These works show imaginative power and professional craft in their encounter with one of the supreme literary imaginations. We can, of course, look at these temperas in themselves as figurative achievements of linear, spatial, and chromatic composition without relating them to the formidable poetical source that prompted them, and they would pass the test of "pure visibility" in the sense of what Bernard Berenson called decorative (i.e. formal) values as opposed to merely illustrative ones. We would then be judging these pictures much as we would the translation of a lost poem in an unknown language. Assuming a high level of poetical dignity in such a text, we would value it less for its unverifiable archaelogical usefulness than for its intrinsic accomplishment. The comparison is far from futile, if we only reflect that for a visual artist like Panichi (Italian, born 1937) to illustrate a long literary work of art is to translate it into his own medium, namely to fragment and compress an elaborate narrative into a sequence of chosen climactic images. These images in turn cannot just retell the original story in their discontinuous way; they must stand on their own merit as paintings (or engravings, etchings, woodcuts, as the case may be). By this exacting standard, Panichi's scenes from The Divine Comedy affect the viewer's sensibility even before their specific narrative import is realized. They whrite in a sinister glow, or come at us from disquieting gloom, to people our mind with palpable ghosts. Or they burn in ochre and brick-red and brown, through a distorted space. Then we react, our mind focuses, and we can recognize each scene and name its characters: this is Francesca carried away by the passionate whirlwind, this is Pier delle Vigne the bleeding and talking bush, this is defiant Farinata in his flaming tomb, this is Cererus the devil… Such was my experience when I first saw Panichi's Divine Comedy on the walls of Palazzo Corsini's halls in his native Florence in May, 1986. I said to myself that this expressionist artist also happened to be an ideally suitable illustrator of Dante because he could certainly capture with charcoal and brush some of Dante's inimitable verbal energy. Remembering some other Dante illustrators (like Blake, Doré, or Rauschenberg), I realized he more than held his own against each of them, interpretative freedom in his case going hand in hand with specific reference. Panichi stood up so well to the challenge because he is first of all an accomplished painter who can approach the task of illustration on his own terms. He is also a scholar. He has had formal training in classical literature, and in 1977 he published an anthology, with his own commentary, of essays on painting by Renaissance and later artists and theoreticians. Another book, explicating the technical passages in the writings of Giorgio Vasari, is in progress. But erudition has not weighed down Panichi's art. Like the Renaissance artists he knows so well, he handles both pen and brush without detriment to either. One has only to inspect the portraits and landscapes and group scenes that decorate his studio home on Bellosguardo Hill to realize how truly painterly his art is, how blessedly unliterary. He treats the human face and figure with the intensity to be expected from one who has lived through abstractionism and other avant-garde art movements and reconstructs on a new basis the world they shattered. Appropriately he calls his urban landscapes "metaphysicals" because they seem on the verge of dissolution into (or rematerialization from) a haunting haze. Panichi achieves this effect by scraping the laid-on pigment with the thinnest of multiple parallel lines, after superimposing some spatula work on preliminary brushwork. In this way he can give us, for instance, an eerie ballerina from other spheres, a body turned intangible, a disquieting beauty. Most of his recent work (as sampled in a 1983 exhibition) is metaphysical indeed, without thereby recalling the historical movement from the early 1920s of which De Chirico, Carrà and Morandi were briefly members. If ever since his first exhibition in 1969 he has made a solid if limited reputation for himself, it is because he refuses affiliation with any group or trend.