Leonardo Castellani

In Europe, our century's culture is alive with cross-references, influences and encounters in a dense, tangled weft held together by widely diverging contributions of the most distant origins. Yet upon this fertile ground and from this common, contaminated matrix emerge a few great artists who in their works summarize the entire spirit of the age, while nourishing and renewing it. Among these is without a doubt Leonardo Castellani [i] who, with his distinct graphic and pictorial tekhne, is much like other figurative and poetic archetypes in the Italian tradition in that the more they participate in that unity, the more they come alive released within it. That, by means of the sublimation of a landscape, such as Castellani's Urbino landscape [ii], elevated sic et sempliciter to a universality of vision, one can be European, is the point of view held by two other great masters, Osvaldo Licini and Giorgio Morandi (who, among other things, were friends and admirers of Castellani).

This recognition of a spiritual dimension in Castellani's work which is not only 'national' brings one, then, to lay out an informal discussion of the interpretation of his artistic production [iii] - from the etchings to paintings, from drawings to sculptures, from watercolors to ceramics. As this production, for the absoluteness of its results, the characteristics of its style, the elimination in it of all vitalistic dross and for the extreme sobriety of its iconographic motifs, has lent itself to a sometimes hermeneutic justification that — although appreciative of its linguistic achievements and aided by its apparent disagreement with the avant-gardes that have slowly but surely succeeded one another in the history of art in the 20 century — it tends to isolate itself in a classical fossilization', from which every intrusion of life is eliminated.

However, in talking about the purity and elimination of content in Castellani's work, one risks performing a dangerous operation of 'shutting out', and thus suffocating it in a space without air. Instead, that figurative koine must be interpreted within the limits of its relationships with, connections to and immersion in the world. No one would then want to believe anymore in the 'intimism', the subconsciousness, the abstractness of Castellani's work (as for too long in fact was thought in the case of Morandi.) Rather, one will think of the inner life, the poetry of things, the profound existence and the loneliness that are all real ways of joining together with mankind. As wrote Pascal on this subject, «L'homme qui n'aime que soi ne hait rien tant que d'etre seul avec soi» [iv]. Castellani's capacity for solitude was the sign — the seal — of his human openness and cultural broadmindedness[v].

In fact, the controlled, precise and monotonous meter of the hours, days and seasons in his paintings and etchings becomes a wealth of existential adventures. Like Proust [vi], Castellani finds himself both at the heart of contemporary art, and at the heart of the times.

In more than seventy years of documented work he created a world of images, sublime fragments of a sentimental and aesthetic reality that could not be more varied, fruitful, and lyrical. His works are at times isolated, autonomous, striking; at times, fanciful waves of mystery thrive on sequences of variations on a 'sentence' or on a theme, as in Mozart; at times, they are soft touches, barely perceptible movements of an intense, sinking, melancholy spirit.

This universe — and the manner in which the vision is captured, drawn into an obscure flash of understanding, becoming witness to and participant in a cosmic reverie in which reason and feeling can no longer be differentiated — is based upon an invented language that, in demoting its Cezannian, futurist and 'neo-Fifteenth century's beginnings almost to a sort of prehistory, explodes both unforeseen and splendid to determine «the azurine levity of the places of the soul [vii] and the subtle weft of its relationships within the painting. This is the so-called luminism' of Castellani: «that peculiar light of the cicada's song in the silence of summer», that has always, one might say, «exalted and persecuted him» [viii].

[i] Almost eight years after his death, it is difficult to bear witness to the human and artistic truth of Castellani's work leaving out of consideration a detailed study of his character and life, both of which have undoubtedly influenced the good fortune - not equal however to its merit - of his artistic production. I would like to recall the last year in which he held his teaching position in the Chalcography Department at the Istituto del Libro in Urbino. At the time, I was much impressed by his sobriety, and by the order and decorum that were in force in his department. Castellani's art was unquestionably in harmony with his clarity of mind and of senses, secluded from any kind of pictorial fraud and from the dispersion and volatility of the ego.
Then, on the occasion of the anthological exhibit that the city of Urbino wished to dedicate in his honor in the summer of 1976 (partly upon my suggestion and upon the insistence of several young intellectuals who formed the core of the Cultural Commission in that period) I, adhering to his wishes regarding the text of the catalogue, went personally to see Marco Valsecchi (who was at the time already in poor health) to record by magnetophone - and then reorganize - the lovely essay that would later be printed. In that difficult situation, I was able to fully understand the singular modesty of this master: it was, on the one hand, a limit to the affirmation of his own self beyond the limits in which his worth was effectively recognized. It was equally, however, an inner richness worn in a completely natural way. In 1981, on the occasion of the first edition of the exhibit entitled Linguaggio dell'incisione (The Language of Engraving) which travelled to many Italian cities and then abroad, I placed him in the section of the 'classics', next to such tutelary names as those of Bartolini and Morandi. Once again it was Castellani who surprised us rather more than the critics, who accepted that definition as the rightful compensation for his efforts (although in truth very little did they then do to solidify that reputation, in the way of additional analyses). But this world, and in particular the art world, is like that; and Castellani was too solitary and shy to advocate his image with the infinite arsenal of stratagems and caution that pay off in the short run.
To this must be added bad luck: the planned exhibit at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, fixed for the autumn of 1983, was cancelled at the last moment due to an accidental outage of the lighting system. Likewise, after Dario Darbè was removed from the position of Director - thanks to the extremely debatable and scarcely honorable diktat of the Minister all possibility of presenting an updated version of the same anthology in the following year disappeared. These events have unfortunately corroded and polluted the understanding of Castellani's work among both the public and the mass-media. But time or, in other terms, the quality of his work, plays without doubt in his favor.

[ii] Paolo Volponi, Introduction to the exhibit catalogue of the 1977 one-man exhibit at the Centro d'Arte Sintesi in Milan.

[iii] Castellani's brushstroke, is of «... varying intensity and vibrations, at times breaking up naturally like sandstone in the summer, at other times swelling like clay, trembling like a leaf, or filtering through like a light. And it is this stroke that wove Castellani's poetic 'warping', that made its rules and organized its relationships. It can even become an extract in and of itself, material with which to work, a point of comparison, when loving and critical impatience draw the judgment and the hand of Castellani, ricocheting from one plane to the other, following a light or a new rule for that which would be constructed. This stroke is the essence of Castellani's style, as perceptible in his pictures and oil paintings as it is in the lithographs;(Paolo Volponi, op. cit.)

[iv] To Castellani, Pascal's Thoughts was a livre de chevet'. Nevertheless, to put Castellani's poetry side with, on the one hand, that of Leopardi, and on the other with that of Pascal's, is to squeeze its supremacy of form between the anguish of infinity and the anguish of nothingness.

[v] That Castellani was a solitary soul is without doubt, but it is equally true that, from his home/studio in Urbino (where he began, matured and concluded his human and artistic experience), he kept his 'window on Europe' wide open. Nothing that was essential ever escaped him - nothing, that is, that could have nourished his art in a profound way and therefore made him even more sure of what he was searching for. Likewise, he had always drawn from the teachings of the great masters of the past. Castellani's artistic procedure was carried out within the specific of its language, without any literary 'concessions', or transgressions emphasizing content rather than form. This was true for Castellani to the point of identifying himself in it the most inner path of the artist inside his own conscience.

[vi] The Parisian writer lingered over this idea in 1895, in a memorable passage of his petite etude de philosophy de l'art, dedicated to Chardin and Rembrandt, dealing with several poetic themes that evidently seemed to coincide with those of Castellani.

[vii] Floriano De Santi, Leonardo Castellani, Milan, Fabbri Editori, 1986, pp. 15-16.

[viii] Neri Pozza, Le acqueforti di Leonardo Castellani (1948-1961). (Etchings by Leonardo Castellani, 1948-1961), in the introduction to the catalogue of the 1962 exhibit at the Casa del Palladio, in Vicenza, Italy.