Benvenuto Benvenuti's tower of Calafuria, the visionary evocation of an emotion

The Calafuria watchtower suddenly appears among the rocks as one descends along the Aurelia in that wonderful stretch that, having left Livorno and passed the Antignano coastline, skirts the cliffs just below Montenero and leads toward the village of Quercianella. Centuries ago it was a post of great importance in the defense system that the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had arranged along the Livorno coast in an attempt to secure it from Saracen raids. Today, after being for some time home to the studio of painter Alberto Fremura, it is no longer in use: however, possible new uses are being discussed after it is restored. The Calafuria tower thus merely fulfills its role as a recognizable sign of the landscape, in the stretch of coastline that film lovers remember in the final scenes of Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso and that the people of Livorno habitually choose as the destination of their days at the seaside.

And as an unmistakable presence on the Leghorn coastline Benvenuto Benvenuti must have seen it too, when he painted it in one of his most famous paintings, now housed at the “Giovanni Fattori” Civic Museum in Leghorn, where it arrived in 1978 with the testamentary bequest of Giuseppina Bianchi, widow of collector Ferdinando Mazzini. There is no longer, in front of the Tower, the berceau overlooking the sea that we see in Benvenuti’s painting: in its place is now a busy brick restaurant. The tower, however, has remained as it was when Benvenuti painted it: a severe block eight meters high, with a gallery at the top, a sloping pitched roof, a long access ramp, and facades bitten by wind and brackish.

Benvenuti most likely painted the tower in the 1920s, having just returned from World War I. In a private collection there is another work similar to this one, 20 years later: Compared to the later example, the one in the Livorno Civic Museum denotes “a brighter background texture,” wrote Maddalena Paola Winspeare, “a blue glaze not fringed in the myriad of regular filaments that make up, on the other hand, the other tower and characterize all the artist’s later production.” Here, the Leghorn artist remains faithful to his ideas, to his visionary language that still looks to pointillism, despite the fact that the climate of the years following the conflict that devastated Europe had imposed other paths on painters who wished to prove themselves more up-to-date and in line with the new taste and directions in painting. Benvenuti, at a very young age in the early years of the twentieth century, had been one of the most innovative Divisionists: his painting was dreamlike, anti-naturalist, fed on Symbolist suggestions, transfigured landscapes into dreamlike visions with far-fetched, acidic, dazzling colors, and was capable of creating worlds that were unreal but at the same time so close and familiar.

This was the measure of his art in his beginnings; it would be the same in his maturity. And even in this painting from the 1920s the enchantment of a mystical painter intoxicated with light and silence dominates. The tower of Calafuria stands imperious in a piece of backlighting, under a roaring rain of sunbeams that sweep over it and throw themselves on the sea, not before having surrounded it with a golden aura, which makes it an almost spiritual, numinous presence. Benvenuti is still a painter who declines the Divisionist language learned with naturalness and passion from Vittore Grubicy, his mentor, teacher and brotherly friend, according to Symbolist accents. Counterbalancing the sacred presence of the tower is the wooden gazebo, with its thatched roof, placed to preside over the terrace overlooking the sea and the land filled with sandstone and sand, on which a blanket of grass stretches shyly: here, on the contrary, not a blade of shade can be seen, everything is parched by the sun.

Benvenuti’s, however, is not painting processed in the moment, not painting that captures an instant. If anything, the tower of Calafuria is the impression of a moment that lives in the artist’s memories under different guises: it is reworking and reinvention of something that the painter has seen and made his own, according to a process of recovery, well known to neuroscience, that varies from subject to subject. The tower of Calafuria is objectively identical for anyone who looks at it, but if at a distance of time one asked each person who looked at it to recall that moment, everything would change. Memory, psychobiologist Alberto Oliverio has written, has several dimensions, and those who remember “also determine the level of emotional connotation of their memories, which are not only reenacted or reconstructed but constructed differently according to needs, interpretations, and emotional states.” This is the assumption behind the painting of Benvenuto Benvenuti, who in turn was directed along this path by Grubicy. The process that unites the two artists is similar; the outcomes are different. Benvenuti, an artist perhaps less melancholic than his master but more ascetic and primitive, is able to create hallucinated visions with his painting of metaphysical lights and unreal colors, closely following what his most experienced friend recommended to him in a letter dated April 29, 1911, now preserved among the papers of the Grubicy Fund at the Mart in Rovereto: “Unique emotion (of that given moment stored in the spirit so that one can recall not only the memory but the vision of it with a spiritual gymnastics of hallucinatory re-enactment). Loving and careful study of all the objective elements that constitute the scene, not to copy them, no, but to know them and make them ready to respond as they are needed, to take their place and reinforce it later as the elaboration progresses.”

And Benvenuti’s spirit resonated with the places of his city: his painting is filled with the monuments that dot Livorno, and he, like all Leghorners, was very attached to his land. Malaparte said that Livorno is the happiest city in Tuscany: to realize this, one only has to go to Calafuria on any summer day. Even in Benvenuti’s time, the rocks of Calafuria were a destination for many Leghorners who, perhaps after a swim at Antignano on the edge of town, would go out for a hike to the tower. We see them arriving after a walk of a few hundred meters in the sun, imagine them sheltering under the thatched hut, stopping to look at the coast, the sea, the horizon. Benvenuto Benvenuti was among them: the painting in the Fattori Museum perhaps conveys to us his memory, intimate, personal and dreamy, of one of those days, and the feelings it stirred in him.

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