Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo in The Still House

 

It takes less than an hour driving from Milan to reach Volpedo, but international tourists and art lovers don’t seem to have yet discovered this sweet area, rich of historical monuments, with gentle vineyards, and of course many good restaurants… and even if Volpedo is where a great master of the Italian XIX century such as Giuseppe Pellizza had his studio, preserved until today with conservative sensitivity thanks of the work of an association of volunteers.

From the elegant “terra di Siena” brown walls, typical of the artists’ studios of that time, to the series of reproductions of Italian Renaissance masters he personally bought for himself, everything has been kept as it were when Pellizza worked there. His personal book collection certainly deserves a particular attention to become familiar with his art practice. On the shelves you can find novels by Tolstoj, Ibsen, Zola, Dante, philosophy books by Marx and Engles, or art volumes, like “Le Vite” by Vasari, the “Trattato della pittura” by Leonardo, the “Trattato” by Cennino Cennini, and also a guide to the Galeria degli Uffizi that the young Pellizza had bought during his stays in Florence. His books, as well as the small landscapes he painted on the easel that now stands in front of the old chimney, all embody essential fingerprints to understand the artist’s mentality. As rarely happens in this kind of museums – please go back to our article about Pablo Picasso’s villa in Mougins – here the atmosphere is definitely trustable: all the artworks hanging on the walls, from the portraits of the painter’s parents, to the small copy of Raffaello Sanzio self-portrait, are original.

There is no way to grasp the poetic of an artist if you don’t have access to his life environment. You will never understand what Vincent VanGogh is painting if you have never felt the wind in Provence, as you will never realize that Surrealism of Salvador Dalì is rooted in the painter’s amazing villa in Port Lligat. Even in the famous video with Jeff Koons talking about the Baloon Dog what makes the difference is indeed the background of his professional factory where the video is shot (not that different from the Pellizza da Volpedo’s one). Hence it is probably not entirely negligible that most of the pics the Still House Group is posting on its blog are actually reflecting the environment its artists live in.

December 15, 2017