Pertini, art lover and collector you don't expect
The President was also an art lover: he collected paintings and sculptures now partly on display at M9 in Mestre. An exhibition that also recounts the person, the militant anti-fascist, the role of Head of State
He kept them in his attic at the Trevi Fountain, but he also worked to get the Chamber of Deputies to buy them: for Sandro Pertini, works of art were the country's best feature, educating people about beauty and at the same time forcefully conveying a unifying message to the nation.
This is what one discovers, surprisingly, when visiting the exhibition currently running at M9 in Mestre until 31 August: the Pertini collector of the 20th century. Another of the faces of a President who won the hearts of Italians for the values he embodied and for the way he conveyed them: clean, clear-cut, full of transport.
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Twenty-eight paintings and sculptures on loan from the Civic Museums of Savona - to which Pertini's widow, Carla Voltolina, donated the collections - are on display, tracing an itinerary showing the sharp eye for choice and identifying the themes dear to the Head of State, from the Resistance to work, from peace to freedom and love for his land. A passion, a taste that can also be found in the correspondence with artists, with whom he often established friendly relations, and in the notes that Pertini loved to jot down.
If the labourer painted by Giuseppe Zigaina carries a hammer and sickle - tools that say it all - next to a bicycle (a typically 'Pertinian' object), Renato Guttuso's fishermen face the Sicilian sea, the strength of the group diluting their fatigue, while the workers depicted by Tono Zancanaro, in Comacchio, have a defiant posture, as grey as the village houses. Opposite to that, proud and slender, of Agenore Fabbri's bronze Mondina. Emilio Vedova's Sorcerer explodes with his colours and spikes, while the face of Anatole France (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, one of the President's favourites) sketched by Filippo De Pisis interrogates us with a brooding gaze. The Death of Caesar by Aligi Sassu evokes other possible tyrannicides in 1938, just as Giacomo Manzù's The Death of the Partisan recounts, in its quiet drama, the horror of Nazi-Fascism. There is also one of Giorgio Morandi's compositions, long desired and pursued by Pertini, as well as the late Mario Mafai or an abstract work by Antonio Corpora.
'It really is a collection of the art history of 20th century Italia: it has them all, or almost all. He wasn't afraid of anything, he went from classical figurative art to abstractionism, from tradition to the new, because a nation makes sense if it knows the culture of its time,' observes Serena Bertolucci, director of the Museo del '900 and promoter of several initiatives, including visits dedicated to a single work, explained and commented on in detail.
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