Ode to the Marquis Ricci who revived Ugo Celada from Virgilio
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The exhibition at the Masone Labyrinth, which can be visited until 17 September, is a unique opportunity to rediscover the twentieth-century and Lombard painter and his “purified version of imperfect reality”
I hate exhibitions but without the exhibition at the Masone Labyrinth when ever, where ever I would have understood Ugo Celada from Virgil. Because the paintings of this very twentieth-century and very Lombard painter (born in Virgilio di Mantova in 1895, lived in Milan, died in Varese in 1995, a few months before his 100th birthday) are mostly found in private homes. Some right at the home of the Celada heirs. Such privacy has a bourgeois, domestic beauty but it also speaks of the public incomprehension suffered by the one who has obtained, on the side of art supported by the taxpayer, only a few walls in the museum of his native land, the Virgiliano di Pietole, and God forbid. The Fontanellato exhibition is therefore, until 17 September, a unique opportunity. Then I had formed the lazy conviction that Celada was the painter of only one picture, the “Portrait of a man with glasses”oil on panel without date but by eye I would say the Forties, 105×83 centimeters, many times admired and always admirable here in the permanent collection.
One of the brilliant purchases he was capable of Franco Maria Ricci. If, unlike me, you haven’t met him, the only true Divine Marquis (Sade was a Marquis like Ricci and yet Demonic), I’m sorry for you. If you don’t know about him, the creator of the gigantic Labyrinth or the most important and audacious private aesthetic enterprise in Italy today, you deserve Fedez or Fazio or Fuksas, your choice. A man of absolute taste, of absolute eye, of absolute freedom, able to see the beauty where the others, gregarious capable of ecstasy only in the slipstream, saw nothing. I don’t know the year in which Ricci bought the “Portrait of a Man”, it was certainly in a time, in a decade during which Celada didn’t get away with it. Thus the present exhibition at the Labyrinth is a double recognition: for Celada’s brush and for Ricci’s flair.
I’ve always called him “Il Commendatore”, the man with the glasses in the undated portrait and yet 1940s. For features, pose, clothing. Only in the exhibition did I discover that Celada was fond of the Commendatori, or perhaps they were the Commendatori fond of him. To his “purified version of imperfect reality” (as Cristian Valenti writes in the extremely refined catalogue), to his sharpness, to his accuracy. Characteristic sharpness and accuracy, four centuries earlier, of the portraits of Parmigianino who, coincidentally, worked here in Fontanellato and who immortalized characters from Fontanellato. I am thinking of the supreme portrait of Galeazzo Sanvitale (not commendatore but leader) conserved in Capodimonte… Here we pause instead in front of the “Portrait of Commendator Pietro Belloli”, a well-deserving still young man, black wavy hair, round black glasses, striped tie, handkerchief in his pocket and well-kept hands (hands and nails are Casa Celada specialties). Commendatore was also Angelo Motta, the man who made Christmas in Milan the Italian Christmas, who transformed a local dessert into a national dessert: panettone, of course.
The industrialist was also a knight of labour, therefore a sum of industrious lombardidad, to quote Gianni Brera. Arrived in Milan from the mists of Villa Fornaci, a hamlet of Gessate, just as Celada arrived from the mists of Cerese (“a satellite village, a nothing” writes the terrible Ceronetti in “Albergo Italia”), a hamlet of Virgilio. Two Po Valley born out of hand. In the moral and material capital they made their fortune in different ways and in different quantities. Of a champion of Italy who made himself great again after the debasement of the war, the oil portrait expresses prosperity, dignity, intimate satisfaction, vigilant commitment: “An enterprising spirit knew how from nothing to rise to the highest goals in the field of the confectionery industry…”. That was a bourgeoisie, an entrepreneurship that believed in itself and intended to stay. And with these portraits she stayed. Nothing like the pictorial portrait projects personality beyond the limits of physical life. Oil on canvas defies the centuries as opposed to photographs, destined for obsolescence. The heirs of those who in the twentieth century hoped to immortalize themselves by turning to a photographer find sad, folded and yellowed papers in their hands. While the Labyrinth exhibition rekindles the spotlight on an art that has been perfectly preserved in the shadows of Lombard salons and today displays the best twentieth-century values as if time had not passed. First of all, the value of the work: on Motta’s table is the Corriere della Sera with an advertising page of the famous panettone.
Finally the nudes, which are in truth in the first room but so beautiful as to force you to go back when you have seen everything and should leave. For a form of fulminating nostalgia. I hate exhibitions because they are full of badly dressed people but sometimes in the paintings the women are so well dressed that they deserve a small sacrifice. Celada’s nudes deserve it, also because of his wife who often modeled for him. It took me a quarter of an hour to figure out which one is my favorite and here it is: “Nude on red velvet with green curtain”, canvas painted between the twenties and thirties. Valerio Terraroli writes of “classical nude but in a bourgeois key”. Yes, in this and the other nudes we find the callipygian Venuses (from this point of view Signora Celada was very gifted), we find Giorgione, we find Titian, and at the same time we hear the novelties of Pitigrilli and Cagnaccio di San Pietro. With the prefiguration, in certain paintings (“La smorfiosa”, “Reclining nude”), even by John Currin… Ugo Celada da Virgilio died at the age of one hundred in Varese, is reborn today in Fontanellato.
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