Emplastic Oil - Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico

186
SALVATORE VACANTI: FROM MURAL PAINTING TO “EMPLASTIC OIL”
Finally, the Friulian painter Luigi Zuccheri 115 also merits mention. Of aristocratic origin, he devoted
himself to painting only after resisting strong family pressure. He studied privately, away from
the art academies and from the main nuclei of Italian Avant-garde. Nonetheless, during a long stay
in Paris around 1930, Zuccheri became attracted to Surrealism. This experience together with his
literary studies must have encouraged his deep capacity for the fantastical. His painting is in appearance
descriptive, faithfully adhering to Nature, which is a constant theme of his: vast expanses of
fields under cloudless or tempestuous skies with birds ready to migrate in the foreground, or the
depiction of courtyard animals as resigned prisoners; fish from the rivers of Friuli and Venice’s
Laguna are also sometimes depicted. His paintings might recall encyclopaedic illustrations, but on
closer examination reveal elements of a transcendent reality (fig. 18). They evoke certain works of
Savinio, De Pisis and de Chirico, but also the Old Masters, such as Brueghel the Elder and
Hieronymus Bosch, who had inspired many other fantastical visions in European painting in the
period between the two World Wars. 116
Between 1940 and 1943, Zuccheri underwent a strong spiritual crisis brought on by the Second
World War, which he translated into a stylistic metamorphosis. During this period he also experimented
for the first times with the properties of paints and varnishes. Zuccheri indeed abandoned the more
“modern” oil technique for the “historic” egg tempera technique. He began by rediscovering and studying
ancient books on paint formulas, an exercise that further refined his research 117 , thus emulating
the journey undertaken by de Chirico twenty years previously, when the latter championed the revival
of “oil tempera”. The two artists finally met after the end of the war and initiated an active friendship
centred around discussions on the secrets of tempera, also communicated in letters. 118
Around 1947 Zuccheri bought a small property on the hills near Florence, where he soon developed
close friendships with scholars, collectors and other artists. Sometime between 1947 and 1948
Zuccheri met de Chirico at the home of Primo Conti, and thus initiated a relationship decisive for
his artistic maturation. It should be noted that it was in Florence in the very same period that de
Chirico assisted in the founding of Pittori moderni della realtà. Zuccheri was in fact the artist with
whom de Chirico shared the greatest amount of similarities, whose allure he felt intensely and whom
he esteemed for his particular interest in painterly technique. Many years later, at the death of the
Friulian artist, de Chirico wrote:
I admired [Zuccheri] for his passionate research into all the secrets of tempera, which is the origin of
all painting […]. I often met him in Venice during my stays there and I spent considerable time in his
studio discussing with him the secrets and advantages of tempera. He would tell me about his formu-
115
Luigi Zuccheri (Gemona del Friuli, 1904 - Venice, 1974) took up painting after interrupting his literary studies. During a stay in Paris (1929-30) he
became interested in Surrealism, without, however, forming a solid connection. Displeased with the painting of his youth, he retired to Friuli; between
1933 and 1943 he devoted himself to technical and painterly research. He held his first solo exhibition in Trieste in 1939, which came to nothing due
to the artist’s disillusionment with his own work. He took up painting again in the post-war period, still as a secluded painter in silent polemic against
his times. See Luigi Zuccheri, exhibition catalogue, G. Perocco ed., Arti grafiche Friulane, Udine 1988.
116
See M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Dizionarietto per Zuccheri, in Zuccheri, edited by M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, G. Vallese, Mondadori, Milan 1990, pp. 7-9.
117
See G. Vallese, Zuccheri, la maniera e il capriccio, in M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, G. Vallese, op. cit., pp. 11-43.
118
As seen in the unpublished correspondence from 1952 to the death of Luigi Zuccheri in 1974, de Chirico encouraged his friend with notable expressions
of esteem. I thank Professor Giulia Vallese for this information.
METAPHYSICAL ART 2010|N° 9/10