Livorno hosts major exhibition on Gino Romiti at two venues

A major exhibition dedicated to Gino Romiti and the protagonists of the early 20th century in Livorno: it is titled La Beata Riva. Gino Romiti and Spiritualism in Livorno. Protagonists and Cenacles among the School of Guglielmo Micheli, Caffè Bardi and Bottega d’Arte, the exhibition that, from Oct. 6, 2022 to Feb. 16, 2023, takes place between the Livorno Foundation and the Pinacoteca Comunale “Carlo Servolini” in Collesalvetti. The exhibition is promoted by Fondazione Livorno, Fondazione Livorno - Arte e Cultura and the Municipality of Collesalvetti and curated by Francesca Cagianelli

Designed according to a monographic and thematic itinerary, the exhibition includes more than eighty works dedicated to Gino Romiti (Livorno, 1881 - 1967) and the Divisionist and Symbolist coterie formed in Livorno between the first and second decade of the 20th century. The exhibition aims to retrace the stylistic evolution of the Leghorn artist that matured thanks to his encounter with the Belgian Charles Doudelet and the devotion paid since 1906 to Vittore Grubicy De Dragon, against the backdrop of the spiritualist wave sweeping the city’s artistic circuits, between Micheli’s School, Caffè Bardi and Bottega d’Arte. In a Livorno traversed by D’Annunzio’s myths and Angelo Conti’s aesthetic theories, as well as by the horror echo of Edgar Allan Poe ’s fantastic tales filtered through translations signed by Charles Baudelaire, sea bottoms and ancient gardens become theaters of spiritual visions, as confirmed by the mermaids floating among the flora and fauna of the abysses vaguely envisioned by Gino Romiti, as well as its parks and garden corners turn into mysterious labyrinths where it remains possible to embark on an initiatory path.

It is precisely some pictorial and graphic evidence that has emerged from the scouring of the Romiti Archive that has allowed the in-depth investigation of a completely unpublished chapter in Gino Romiti’s many years of stylistic career, that is, that which can be traced back to the fellowship established in early twentieth-century Livorno around the charismatic personality of the Ragusa-born man of letters Enrico Cavacchioli (Pozzallo, 1885 - Milan, 1954). Precisely on the occasion of the 160th anniversary of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s birth, the exhibition aims to be an opportunity to savor an extremely important cultural season for early 20th-century Livorno, pervaded by the spread of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s word and the aesthetics of writer and philosopher Angelo Conti.

The exhibition includes five sections, the first two of which are respectively dedicated to Gino Romiti’s aesthetic creed and artistic maturity, The Artistic Creed of Gino Romiti from the Lesson of Guglielmo Micheli to the Word of Vittore Grubicy De Dragon (I section) and The Infinite Joy: Toward Eternal Melody (II section), were set up at the Fondazione Livorno headquarters and attest to the stylistic parabola of the artist, trained in the ’ambit at the school of Guglielmo Micheli together with a multiform and up-to-date group of artists and converted between 1902 and 1904 to the pointillism of Giovanni Segantini and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, as evidenced by some unpublished postcard sketches made for his friend Adriano Baracchini Caputi, reproduced for the first time in the exhibition catalog.

The next three sections, respectively, On the Wings of Chimeras. Gino Romiti in the Livorno of Enrico Cavacchioli (Section III), Il Volto dell’Azzurro. Protagonists and Cenacles on the Tyrrhenian Shore between Micheli’s School, Caffè Bardi and Bottega d’Arte (IV section), and Paper Seductions and Spells. The Fatal Myth of the Mermaid in the Graphics of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, on the other hand, can be visited at the Pinacoteca Comunale Carlo Servolini and constitute a lunge into Romiti’s Symbolist production.

Well known in the city, as well as nationally, for his landscape and seascape production, traced by contemporary critics when to the Macchiaioli tradition, when instead to the moderate luminous update in vogue in Micheli’s school, when finally to the lesson of the protagonists of Italian Divisionism from Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo to Vittore Grubicy De Dragon, Gino Romiti lives again in this exhibition with a new cultural and artistic identity. The aim of the exhibition and the critical operation linked to it is to relocate the artist, also through the recovery of works never seen from the Romiti Archive that are presented on this occasion for the first time, in a national and international historiographical panorama.

It is precisely the Venuses and Sirens scattered by Gino Romiti in his famous seascapes, as well as by other protagonists of the Livorno artistic coterie of Caffè Bardi, such as in particular Benvenuto Benvenuti, Mario Pieri Nerli and Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona, that claim an iconographic and stylistic belonging to the reservoir of international graphic art, as highlighted in the fifth section of the exhibition, Seductions and Spells of Paper. The Fatal Myth of the Siren in the Graphics of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, curated by Emanuele Bardazzi.

The exhibition La Beata Riva. Gino Romiti and Spiritualism in Livorno. Protagonists and Cenacles among the School of Guglielmo Micheli, Caffè Bardi and Bottega d’Arte constitutes a kind of continuation, but also and above all scientific, of the one previously held at the Pinacoteca Comunale Carlo Servolini, Dans le noir. Charles Doudelet and Symbolism in Livorno (Sept. 30, 2021 / Jan. 20, 2022), in that it intends to recompose the historiographical set-up related to the career of Gino Romiti around the events of Symbolism spread in early 20th-century Tuscany, from Florence to Livorno, thanks to the presence of the Belgian Charles Doudelet.

There will also be no lack of a documentary section. In fact, some cornerstones of artistic publishing in Leghorn in the early twentieth century are on display, aimed at documenting the phenomenon of that workshop of literary pronouncements and expressive ideals of undoubted aesthetic and visionary quotient, consolidated in the city sphere between the 1910s and the 1930s: Gustavo Pierotti della Sanguigna, L’epifania d’Adone, Livorno, Belforte 1907 (cover by Gino Romiti); Ettore Serra, Sogno simbolico, Livorno, Belforte 1909 (cover by Benvenuto Benvenuti); Gustavo Pierotti della Sanguigna, Sardanapalo, Livorno, Belforte 1909 (cover by Benvenuto Benvenuti); Aleardo Kutufà, Metafisica teologica, Livorno 1911; Adolfo Simonetti, I canti livornesi, Tip. Benvenuti & Cavaciocchi, Livorno 1929 (cover by Luigi Servolini); Massimo Mazzanti, Armonie della Sera. Liriche, Casini & Ortolani, Florence 1931 (cover by Gino Mazzanti).

To these are added, with the aim of commenting on the investigation of the traces of D’Annunzio’s literature in the pictorial and graphic production of Gino Romiti,Isaotta Guattadauro, published in 1886, accompanied by an illustrative apparatus signed by the group of artists gathered under the initials of the company In Arte Libertas, in particular Giuseppe Cellini, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Mario de Maria, Vincenzo Cabianca, Alfredo Ricci, Alessandro Morani, Enrico Coleman, Onorato Carlandi and Cesare Formilli, and, again, the’exceptional poetic collection by Ferdinando Paolieri, Venere agreste, Florence, Casa Editrice Nerbini, 1908 (cover by Giovanni Costetti), which constitutes a sylloge of iconographic proposals dedicated to the depiction of mythological deities revisited in the light of D’Annunzio’s pantheism.

The exhibition can be visited at the Livorno Foundation Monday through Friday by appointment (339 8289470, mail to info@coopdiderot.it), for schoolchildren contact Cooperativa Itinera at 0586.894563, mail didattica@itinera.it. At the Collesalvetti Art Gallery visits every Thursday from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., for groups and school groups guided tours by appointment. Phone 0586.980251 - 392.6025703, mail pinacoteca@comune.collesalvetti.li.it .

Pictured: Gino Romiti, Symphony of the Sea.

Livorno hosts major exhibition on Gino Romiti at two venues

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