The hard life of fishermen that becomes poetry: the scales at Bocca d'Arno by Francesco Gioli

In fishing jargon, they are called “scales” those large square nets that are attached to long poles equipped with pulleys, and then lowered into a river or the sea: one waits a few moments, and then pulls them up, trying to be fast in the hope that the prey will not escape. They are a familiar presence in Tuscany: in Versilia it is not uncommon to find fishermen setting them up on the pontoons that dot the coast, and there are still those who use them at the Bocca d’Arno. In these parts, where the great river that bathes the region flows into the sea, they call them “retoni”: they are the “hanging nets” that fascinated D’Annunzio, which “hang like scales from the masts / to which they support the high and outstretched bridges / where man watches to turn the rope.” When the Vate was composing his Bocca d’Arno, the mouth of the river was filled with wooden piers from which hung the nets that throngs of fishermen cast into the waters all day long: today that landscape no longer exists, only a few “retoni” built in the immediate postwar period have remained, and above all this kind of fishing has become a form of entertainment. But back then it was a job, a valuable source of livelihood for the poor people of the Tuscan coast.

The scales of Bocca d’Arno are the ones seen in one of Francesco Gioli’s most famous paintings, now owned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. On a winter afternoon, along the river’s shoreline, among marshes and stypa bushes, some fishermen wait in front of the scales, which are about to be lowered into the river: in a diagonal foreshortening, of the kind first pioneered a few decades earlier by Giuseppe Abbati and Giovanni Fattori, aided by the horizontal format of the cartoon, Gioli lines up the piles with their roofs covered with thatch from the marsh grasses of the Arno fishermen, which served as both support for the scales and shelter for the fishermen. And there are fishermen, too, in Gioli’s painting: they are bundled up in their heavy coats of thick cloth to shelter them from the frigid sea breezes. They stand alone, each in front of their scales: there is also one, in the background, who is caught at the rope in the midst of his work.

Gioli painted this oil in 1889: we do not know for sure, but it is likely that the painting in the Foundation is the one that the Pisan artist exhibited that same year at the Promotrice Fiorentina exhibition, under the title Bocca d’Arno. And from then on, that landscape that was so usual for Gioli, as he was born and raised in these parts, attracted many other artists. His countryman Guglielmo Amedeo Lori, for example, who in 1901 brought aDawn at the Mouth of the Arno to the Fourth Venice Biennale. Or his brother Luigi, nine years younger, who in 1902 brought a landscape Presso la foce dell’Arno to Turin. And then again Niccolò Cannicci, Ulvi Liegi, and later Galileo Chini, Federigo Severini, Renato Natali.

Francesco Gioli, Scales at Bocca d’Arno (1889; oil on cardboard, 25 x 70 cm; Florence, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio)

For Francesco Gioli, however, it was not a matter of documenting an aspect of the difficult daily life of the fishermen of the Arno, of rendering a piece of verismo on cardboard, of dealing with what happened every day at the mouth of the river. If anything, it was a matter of approaching the theme with lyrical accents, extracting the poetry of those mornings that were always the same, of those gestures repeated every day, of those men who lived according to the rhythm imposed by nature, of those splendid landscapes that, for them, were nothing more than the place where they could procure a living. In Italy, Nino Costa had been the initiator of the landscape-state of mind, and moreover, the Roman painter had spent the last glimpses of his existence precisely on the Tuscan coast, between Castiglioncello and Marina di Pisa: in his opinion, the real said nothing if it was not filtered through feeling. It was precisely in these areas that Nino Costa, in the mid-1980s, had elaborated his poetics, and Gioli was careful to follow its indications, “on the basis of a vigilant naturalistic attention, but also of a lyrical inclination”, wrote Francesca Cagianelli, who noted how Gioli associates, with the strong drawing inclination of the difficult cut of the composition, which presupposes a complex perspective grid, “a skilful restitution of atmospheric effects, through the search for a correct intonation to which to entrust the suggestion of the hour.”

And from the suggestion of the hour also derive the color choices, which heighten the feeling of melancholy that Gioli seeks to evoke. The low sun, with its reddish glow making its way through the clouds on the horizon, makes the cold, pearly waters of the river glow with golden tones and, conversely, places the fishermen’s shacks, scales and human figures in a robust backlight. The agreement between the cold tones and the strong contrasts between light and shadow are typical of this phase of Francesco Gioli’s production: the artist used these atmospheric effects to accentuate the lyricism of his compositions, of those coastal landscapes which, Enrico Panzacchi wrote in 1897, “he has studied with so much love and knows how to render so attractive in the luminous distances and with the delicate fusion of the various blooms within the variety of greens.”

It was precisely from these years that Gioli had ceased to be “the poetic and gentle illustrator of the Pisan hills,” as Guido Carocci had called him when reviewing his works in 1886, to become an up-to-date painter who was able to transfigure into poetry the harsh seafaring life of the Tuscan coast. A poetry that, those who find themselves admiring the painting often observe, is largely encapsulated in the figure of the fisherman closest to the relative. Gioli’s scales are not a document; they are beyond the scope of any narrative intent or social complaint. It is left, if anything, to the observer to wonder what the harshness, the difficulties, the boredom of that life were: one can try by identifying with the fisherman caught in that very contemplative attitude, melancholy in turn, as he smokes his pipe looking before him at the mass of the flowing river, with his feeling spreading through the atmosphere.

If you enjoyed this article, read the previous ones in the same series: Gabriele Bella’sConcert; Plinio Nomellini’s The Red Nymph;Guercino’s Apparition ofChrist to His Mother; Titian’s Magdalene; Vittorio Zecchin’sOne Thousand and One Nights; Lorenzo Lotto’sTransfiguration; Jacopo Vignali’sTobias and the Angel; Luigi Russolo’s Perfume; Antonio Fontanesi’sNovembre; Cosmè Tura’s Tondi of St. Maurelius; and Simone dei Crocifissi’s Madonna and Child and Angels.

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