Lev Tolstoy returns to Turin

Lev Tolstoy, from Piedmont. Also. Passionately portrayed by the best painters of his time, an artist capable of bewitching even Giacomo Balla who portrayed him but also the finest minds of the early twentieth century. His contagious and controversial figure will be at the center of an artistic-literary flânerie on Saturday 5th November in Turin, at the Palazzina della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti (Viale Balsamo Crivelli 11 at 4 pm), for the series of “Incontri ad Apart Fair Torino 2022” . The historian Roberto Coaloa will lead the dance, with unpublished ideas dedicated to Riccardo Gualino’s collecting, to relations with Balla and Bistolfi. Coaloa spoke on: «Lev Tolstoy and Italy. In memory of his friend Ezio Gribaudo ». Because the Russian writer, already adored by the artists of his country, such as Repin, was also much loved by the Italian ones, such as Giacomo Balla, Giorgio Kienerk and Andrea Fossombrone. The meeting will be attended by Paola Gribaudo, president of the Albertina Academy of Turin and daughter of Ezio Gribaudo, who passed away this year on July 18 at the age of ninety-three. In 1949, the Turin artist dedicated an ink drawing to Tolstoy. Roberto Coaloa (historian, writer, professor of History of the Danubian countries and Eastern Europe, translator and editor for Feltrinelli of the unpublished “War and revolution” and author of the biography on Tolstoy, for Edizioni della sera, with a preface by Goffredo Fofi) narrates the passion for the Russian writer, never extinguished among artists.

In his speech, Coaloa will also recount a series of little known facts that link Piedmont to the Russian world of Tolstoy. For example, in the castle of Cereseto (the work of Vittorio Tornielli, who manages to give substance to Riccardo Gualino’s dreams), the bas-relief of Pietro Canonica, walled up on the base of the tower, is a clear reference to the famous painting “Tolstoy the plowman” by Repin. Coaloa explains: “In the year in which we remember the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Sergej Pavlovič Djagilev, the impresario of the famous Russian ballets who conquered the world before and after the Great War, a thought goes to the couple Riccardo and Cesarina Gualino, who they recreated in the castle of Cereseto a life and a style known in travels to Russia.

The masquerade parties with Jessie Boswell at Cereseto castle were famous, where Cesarina, Bella Markman and Vitia Gourevitch performed. Unforgettable is Cesarina Gualino from Casale with a ribbon on the forehead and a Greek tunic: a novel Isadora Duncan ». Coaloa also adds the very close ties between Tolstoy and Leonardo Bistolfi, thanks to the Italian Nobel laureate Ernesto Teodoro Moneta. Even Bistolfi’s son, Gian Bistolfi, pseudonym of Gianni Bistolfi (known for being Ottorino Respighi’s librettist for Sleeping Beauty, 1922, based on Charles Perrault), became interested in the Russian writer, writing for La Lettura del Corriere della Sera, in 1909, «A curious Tolstoian circle».

Balla’s Tolstoy is a very original portrait, not only for the shape (oil on paper applied on Masonite; the dimensions of the work with the frame are 104×101 cm and without frame. 82.8×85 cm). The “Portrait of Leo Tolstoi” (the work was owned by Mrs. Laura Biagiotti) has a very curious and significant story in the experience lived by our ancestors in contact with the works of the Russian writer of a social and political nature, very widespread in the fin de siècle. Coaloa explains: “Tolstoy fascinated the Belle Époque and after two world wars it continues to be fundamental, for literature – as George Steiner suggested – thanks to its unique Homeric tone, and for our society, for the teaching of nonviolence. and pacifism, central themes of his thought. Tolstoy, with his rejection of all violence and the proposal of the law of love, marked the experiences of the Italian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, and those of his most famous disciple, Gandhi. Tolstoy wrote memorable pages on art, society, philosophy, history, religion, pedagogy. In Italy it was studied by Edmondo Marcucci, who wrote What is vegetarianism and dedicated an essay, now unobtainable, to the memory of his father, Studi su Tolstoi. That artist father, Alessandro Marcucci, who had inspired Giacomo Balla’s beautiful painting on Tolstoy ».

Coaloa, an attentive scholar, goes into the details of the creation of the Turin painter and sculptor: “The georgic, but not courtly, sensibility with which Balla looks at nature is at the antipodes of the symbolist mythology of the painters of the XXV group of the Roman Campagna that he sees in the lands around Rome the mythical places of Aeneas. Balla prefers to closely follow the educational and health action of the Ente Scuole per i Contadini directed by Alessandro Marcucci, his brother-in-law, with Giovanni Cena, Angelo Celli, Sibilla Aleramo, which he brings to the “guitti”, that is to the peasants of the Agro Romano , literacy and quinine chocolates against malaria. He was thus commissioned to exhibit in the “great artistic hut”, conceived by Cambellotti as a symbol of peasant civilization, for the “Mostra dell’Agro Romano” which was held in May-October 1911, as part of the great exhibitions of the fiftieth anniversary of Italy.

Balla exhibits a series of paintings with a peasant theme and pointillist technique, together with a «Portrait of Leo Tolstoi», who died the previous year. The picture, practically painted in a photographic black and white, proposes a poster image as an instrument of propaganda and social struggle. Humanitarian socialism recognized itself then in the anarchic pacifism of Tolstoy, apostle of nonviolence, of a life where the first law is that of love. Furthermore, the image of Tolstoy-peasant-anarchist had been spread by hundreds of images, the best known in Russia was by the painter Repin, who portrayed the writer pulling the plow with a horse, in Italy, however, it was proposed from magazines, for example from a beautiful cover dedicated to «Avanti! of Sunday »on June 28, 1903.

Balla’s gesture, however, also had an anticlerical and polemical significance, directed against the great Roman families, such as the Barberini, who had tried to close the schools of their lands. The episode sees Balla engaged against the Roman environments that hindered the birth of the values ​​of the new nation, and it is a shot that helps to understand how far a certain fascism, that of the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, could attract the artist’s sympathy years later. . With Balla we also return to the significant monument of Pietro Canonica in Cereseto, in the castle of Gualino. It is the last official act, linked to the transformation of the small town of Monferrato and coincides with 21 September 1924, the date of the inauguration of the Monument to the Fallen of Cereseto. The bronze relief of Canonica (three meters by four) commissioned by Riccardo Gualino, was walled up at the base of the main tower of the castle. The work, which is very reminiscent of Repin’s plowman Tolstoy, is actually a replica of the base of the monument to Tsar Alexander II, depicting the abolition of serfdom; an audacious gesture, the memory of the Russia loved by Gualino and the foundation of a modern property, shared by a community of men ».