A face impossible to forget. Tanzio da Varallo's David, between Testori and Rimbaud.

Giovanni Testori was right: it is impossible to forget the faces of Tanzio da Varallo’s two Davids . Especially of the less ancient one, the very blond teenager that Tanzio painted around 1625, of the two the one with the more ephebic face: “a kind of Rimbaud without intellectual ambitions” Testori had defined him in 1959, the year of the first, major exhibition that, in Turin, had made the very tall painter of the mountains known to all, until then a marginal presence in a history of art that had not found him an adequate space, except for the attention that had been reserved for him by Longhi. Testori, for the Turin exhibition, had taken care of everything: he had even written the entire catalog, signing all the essays, compiling every single card, even taking care of the bibliography, according to a practice that is no longer used today. And he had opened up to full recognition of Tanzio da Varallo’s exceptional artistic stature.

One of Testori’s first passions had been Arthur Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer . And in 1973 he had returned to that image he had elaborated fourteen years earlier to emphasize the “Prerimbaudian heartbreak” of Tanzio’s two Davids , as of two Rimbauds who had “lived forever within the valleys or on the mountains.” The idea that most often approaches Tanzio’s two powerful images, the two paintings preserved in the Pinacoteca Civica in Varallo and exhibited side by side, is that which wants them to be shepherds of Valsesia studied from life by the great painter who, born in Alagna to a family of Walser masons and sculptors (his real name was Antonio D’Enrico, and “Tanzio” is nothing more than a phonetic mutation of the patronymic with added nominal ending: he was son of Giovanni, “Anz” in the German dialect of the Walser, thus son “d’Anz”), trained with his brother Giovanni, and left for Rome when he was barely 18: he stayed there fifteen years, with occasional trips to Naples and Abruzzo, and had plenty of time to assimilate the Caravaggesque language and then bring it back to his mountains.

Tanzio da Varallo, David (c. 1616-1620; oil on canvas, 112 x 88 cm; Varallo, Pinacoteca Civica)

Tanzio da Varallo, David (c. 1623-1625; oil on canvas, 120 x 90 cm; Varallo, Pinacoteca Civica)

And the first of the two Davids, the one exhibiting the head of Goliath by lifting it up and holding it by the hair, a work executed around 1616, is the most direct result of Tanzio’s reflections on Caravaggio. The second, on the other hand, is, as mentioned above, about ten years later: Francesco Frangi has found in it “a moment of almost miraculous balance” that is the result of a meeting between the naturalism learned in Rome, the plasticism of the drawing and “the search for a terse and luminous beauty that gives the facial features a regularity that one would be inclined to define as idealized.” However, it is Frangi himself who recognizes that to speak of idealizations in Tanzio is tantamount to introducing a discordant note into the score: there is little of the ideal, after all, in the almost brute force with which the adolescent David grasps and holds, with his vigorous arm, the head of Goliath. It is the strength of the alpine shepherd about to slaughter one of his animals (“they slaughtered their own Goliath with the same implacable and maddening necessity with which they are used to slaughter the pig,” Testori wrote). And see then how his every sinew, his every muscle, the expression on his face, everything is pervaded by an intense energy that shakes his whole body, makes him vibrate along with the light that sets his hair on fire and makes the saber he holds in his right hand sparkle. He, for that matter, is dressed like a valley man, with fur on his shoulders, and even a carniere hanging over his hips. It is not unconditional verism, however: Tanzio’s David is posed, and he is animated by an almost Michelangelo-like vigor, which could be branded as mannerism: it is not so, because the Tanzanian drawing does not flow into academicism, it serves to express the tension that innervates the character. Still, it is not a haughty, triumphant David , proud of what he has done. Nor, however, is he a David tormented by remorse and guilt like Caravaggio’s.

It is difficult to describe the feelings he is experiencing. In the first of the two Davids , there is still a motion of outrage mixed with wonder. The second, on the other hand, has a look that exudes melancholy, anguish, and bewilderment. One would call him a man aware that he has made a dramatic gesture that has changed his life. A man aware of having fulfilled a mission that nonetheless caused a death, aware of having met his destiny even though he was expected to kill another human being: and that is why, art historian Vito Zani has noted, that from his eyes shines “pity, dismay at the spectacle of death.” He is a David who is anything but proud of what he has done: doubtful, insecure, restless, bitten by inner travail, a man who has realized that the carefreeness of youth is hopelessly gone. “Damned amazement,” Testori would have said again. And in David ’s face we almost seem to read the words of Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer : “Ma faiblesse, la cruauté du monde! Mon Dieu, pitié, cachez-moi, je me tiens trop mal.”

This restlessness is also one of the elements that make the faces of the Varallo Davids unforgettable. Tanzio is a painter of truth, rather than of reality. Or of a reality framed in the frame of a feeling of heated devotion, if you prefer. A deeply religious painter, he employs in the Second David roughly the same language as in the chapels of the Sacro Monte of Varallo: even the angels fluttering in the vaults of the mountainous Jerusalem are living corporeal presences. Again Testori, in the preface to the Memoriale ai milanesi di san Carlo Borromeo, wrote that Tanzio’s painting, with that temperament of a “wild and unhappy” artist, is the equivalent of the “physical, material, plebeian and cumbersome tone” of Borromean oratory.

Physical and material is also Tanzio’s painting, and not only because of the imposing presence of his Davids. It is a dense, full-bodied painting: observe, for example, the rocks behind the saber, or the brushstrokes that define the fleece of the fur, or even the blond ringlets of the biblical character. There is no room for too much minutiae. Nevertheless, it is a subject matter embellished with the most refined effects: the light that lights up that same hair with golden gleams, the reddening of the cheeks and left ear, the reflections on the metal of the saber, the contrasts of light and shadow that bring out the David’s jowling, shapely musculature, the precision with which Tanzio restores the net of the carniere (almost a still life piece), the chiaroscuro passages that veil Goliath’s head. And this is to say nothing of the rough mountain beauty of the adolescent face, or of the compositional wisdom that has in the diagonal described by the arm all its fulcrum: an arm that is both a symbolic element, and expresses David’s steadfastness in fulfilling his mission (but in a certain way also the inevitability of his fate), and a practical element, in that it is the means by which Tanzio captures the attention of the sitter, to establish an emotional and intellectual connection with the character painted on the canvas, with the chosen one of divinity. And to make him feel the truth of that young shepherd who, to use Testori’s words again, “has the grim and lacerating snap of a demon, on whose shoulders the remnants of wool are wings torn by struggle and algore.”

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