The autumn 2016 exhibition devoted to Enzo Rossi, staged at the Museo di Palazzo della Penna in Perugia and, before that, at Palazzo Vecchio in San Gemini on the occasion of the 43rd Giostra dell’Arme (Enzo Rossi, dal Neocubismo all’Istituto per l’arte sacra, 24 September to 9 October / 13 October to 4 December, catalogue published by Ente Giostra dell’Arme), made it possible to reconstruct the artist’s path from his beginnings to his maturity, as well as the cultural milieu in which he was formed and grew.
A contemporary of Alberto Burri and Leoncillo, Enzo Rossi was born in Perugia in 1915 and took part, between 1947 and 1956, in the exhilarating artistic experience of Villa Massimo in Rome. This is a story that Orietta Rossi Pinelli, the artist’s daughter and, together with Massimo Duranti and Enrico Crispolti, curator of the exhibition, had examined in depth in 2008 in the essay Villa Massimo 1948-56: un laboratorio di ricerca per un nutrito gruppo di artisti italiani, published in the catalogue Brunori. Una poetica del colore nel secondo Novecento, De Luca editore, Rome (pp. 37-47). The art historian duly recalled how it had been Guttuso who persuaded Togliatti, then a Minister in the provisional government, to assign the spaces left empty at Villa Massimo (formerly an academy for German artists, after 1945 requisitioned by the Italian State as a symbol of the occupation) as art studios for the artists who had distinguished themselves during the Resistance. It was here that Enzo Rossi arrived in 1948, through Leoncillo, beginning the artistic career that would see him play a leading role in the capital, and beyond, for the next forty years.
His beginnings, however, lie in Perugia, where he attended the Istituto d’Arte and met Leoncillo himself, at once forming a strong and lasting bond. He later moved on to the Accademia di Belle Arti, where from 1959 to ’71 he would teach stage design; yet it was in the field of medicine that Rossi unexpectedly received the first stimuli for his own artistic growth. Around the mid-1930s he began working as a microscope draughtsman for various university departments, in particular the department of Pathological Anatomy directed by Professor Severi. This allowed him to reflect on the concept of beauty, noticing how human tissues seen under the microscope, even when diseased, display a harmonious grace, and coming to the conviction that beauty can exist in any condition (some of these plates were shown in the exhibition and published in the aforementioned catalogue).
At the same time came his significant meeting with Gino Severini who, having recently published the volume Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (1936), introduced the young man to Picasso’s Cubism, prompting him to reflect on Guernica. His attention to the details of the microscopic world, combined with the analytical breaking down of reality, led him to a deep examination of artistic work which, however, came to a sharp halt because of the war.
In 1940 he married the painter Tina Rossi, who had come to Perugia from distant Genoa to attend Gerardo Dottori’s lessons at the Academy, the latter having just returned to the city after the long stay in Rome that had begun in 1926. For Enzo Rossi these were years devoted to his young family, but also years of political activism: together with his wife he took part in the Umbrian Resistance, which would later earn him a place among the artists of Villa Massimo. In the meantime, however, his painting had not yet acquired its distinctive character. The tempera on panel titled Marina, of 1941, reveals a language tuned to dreamlike, metaphysical solutions, both in its subject (a bucolic scene in which a young man shown from behind, naked beside his horse, blows a red horn facing the sea) and in the handling of colour, clearly tied to neo-classicising conventions.

Once the war was over, Enzo Rossi’s research resumed its course, and in the works painted from 1946 it shows a clear tribute to the Picasso manner of Guernica, expressed in a marked geometric rigidity and an almost total absence of colour. The subjects settle on still lifes and portraits (Autoritratto, 1946; Natura morta con chitarra e teschio, 1948), while the colours range from grey to brown with faint hints of warm tones. At the same time he moved to via Oberdan, into the premises of the former Santa Maria della Misericordia hospital. The house was large and was immediately turned into a studio, becoming a meeting place for artists and intellectuals: from Enzo Brunori to Giovanni Dragoni and Romeo Mancini (with whom he would form a bond lasting well beyond the Perugia years), to Dante Filippucci, Vittoria Lippi, Valter Binni, Luisa Buitoni, the couple Brajo and Bettina Fuso, and the charismatic Aldo Capitini, who involved these young people in lectures at the University for Foreigners, of which he was rector. The latter would greatly influence Enzo Rossi’s ideological outlook, toward a secular vision of Catholicism from which his reflection on the renewal of sacred art would arise. This is a question studied in detail by Mariano Apa, who devoted an important solo exhibition to the artist (Enzo Rossi. Dignità della Bellezza. Cultura dell’Arte Sacra a Perugia e in Italia, 1936-1996), initially intended to be held in the Sacro Convento di San Francesco in Assisi and then, because of the earthquake, opened in Perugia at the Palazzo dei Priori, Sala del Grifo e del Leone (13-28 December 1997).

Common to these young artists was the practice of working as a group, at times measuring themselves against similar subjects. This is borne out by a singular episode from 1948, when Rossi, Brunori, Mancini and Dragoni worked in parallel on the portrait of the then twenty-two-year-old Lavinia Castellani Albanese who, happening to pass one rainy day right in front of the via Oberdan studio and already familiar with the city’s groups of young artists, was persuaded to sit for them. The result was four excellent works that today help us to identify the stylistic differences in detail (unfortunately Dragoni’s work is currently untraced). These works were presented in the Palazzo della Penna exhibition and published in the catalogue with an entry written by Anna Lisa Vergarolo.
Meanwhile Rossi was commissioned to carry out significant mural works, such as the large fresco in the Angora-Spagnoli factory, Le operaie dell’Angora (1947), and the wall paintings for the La Rosetta restaurant (1948), as well as theatrical projects such as the sets and costumes for opera (Edipus Rex by Stravinsky for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples). In 1948 he then held his first solo exhibition in Perugia, at the Galleria Nuova, and that same year his friends Franco Rodano and Leoncillo persuaded him to move to Rome, to be hosted in the studio that Leoncillo occupied at Villa Massimo.
Thus began a fervent season, and soon Enzo Brunori, Vittoria Lippi, Romeo Mancini and Ugo Rambaldi also arrived in the capital, forming a veritable Umbrian ‘colony’. The villa also housed the studio-homes of Guttuso, Mazzacurati, Emilio Greco, Guido La Regina and other artists, becoming a point of reference for many art critics as well: from Lionello Venturi to Cesare Vivaldi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Palma Bucarelli, down to the very young Bruno Toscano, Corrado Maltese, Maurizio Calvesi and Enrico Crispolti. At Villa Massimo the atmosphere already experienced in the via Oberdan house was renewed, as confirmed by the painting Sedia, cappotto, cappello (1950), made by Rossi at the same time as Brunori and Leoncillo in the latter’s studio, reprising the experience carried out with the young Lavinia (this episode was examined by Enrico Crispolti in the catalogue of the exhibition Leoncillo dei tagli e delle figure sfuggenti, curated by Massimo Duranti, held in 2015 at San Gemini, Palazzo Vecchio, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth). This time it is not a human figure but a still life made up of a chair, a coat and a hat, that is, Leoncillo’s garments as he was accustomed to leaving them in his studio. An apparently marginal episode, yet one that again highlights the working method of these young artists, constantly engaged in a stylistic dialogue on post-Cubist language.

The Perugia exhibition set aside an entire section for the group of Umbrians at Villa Massimo, allowing a comparison between the works of Leoncillo, Brunori, Romeo Mancini, Vittoria Lippi and Ugo Rambaldi, testifying to that happy moment of shared work. It was thanks to this climate that, not by chance, Rossi decided in 1950 to settle permanently in Rome, joined four years later by his family (the couple had two children, Orietta and Paolo), moving to the nearby via di Villa Ricotti. A new painterly season opened, perhaps also owing to the influence of his painter wife, with whom he once again lived side by side. A series of works devoted to the landscape of Villa Ricotti bears witness to the transformation under way, marked by greater chromatic vivacity combined with an Expressionist dynamism. Colour gains ground in the painting, lightening the initial geometric structure into thin lattices and linear forms of Futurist descent.

In Rome, however, there was not only Villa Massimo: deeply religious and influenced by Capitini’s thought, now immersed in the heart of Christianity, he was in fact drawn more and more toward the path of sacred art. The first opportunity came with the Jubilee of 1950, for which he received commissions that he worked on together with Enzo Brunori. From this point the commissions for sacred art multiplied: the decoration of the chapel of the Istituto Mendel (Rome, 1955, again with Brunori), work in the church of the Getzemani at Casale Cortecerro (Novara, 1951-’53) including frescoes, mosaics, paintings and stained-glass windows. It is precisely the stained-glass technique that allowed the artist to find the right mediation between modernity and post-Cubist language. The works are enriched by the strong colours produced by the sunlight that sets the glass aglow, yet the composition loses none of its rigidity; on the contrary, it gains in it. He made stained-glass windows for a new church of the Getzemani at Paestum (1956-58); in Foligno, in 1963, the window with a load-bearing reinforced-concrete frame for the facade of the church of San Giuseppe Artigiano; and, again in ’63, windows with the Annunciating Angel, the Virgin and the Risen Christ for the Cemetery of Perugia, and a window with the Risen Christ for the cemetery of Città di Castello as well.
As he developed a new awareness of sacred art, he began to imagine founding a true art school devoted to it. The artist’s thinking, moreover, became ever more rigorous: a series of drawings (shown in the exhibition and published in the catalogue) attests to the discipline he set himself in 1963, forcing himself to make one ballpoint-pen drawing (35×50) every day for four months, taking any subject at all. The aim was to test the thesis he had absorbed in his youth while drawing under the microscope, namely that beauty is present in everything, provided it is observed with the utmost attention.
With the Second Vatican Council, the idea of a school dedicated to the renewal of sacred art gained ever more ground, until it took shape in 1966 (a tragic year that saw the death of his nineteen-year-old son Paolo during the student demonstrations at the Sapienza) with the opening of the State Institute for the Decoration and Furnishing of the Church, in via del Frantoio in Rome. The school was organised into a series of workshops entrusted to artists who, though distant in generation and culture, were considered by Rossi himself sound and capable: the goldsmithing and metals workshop, for example, was entrusted to the young Giuseppe Uncini, while Renato Livi took charge of textiles. There was also Giovanni Dragoni, one of his lifelong friends, who taught sculpture, and from Perugia the then twenty-year-old Paolo Pasticci had come down to Rome, likewise engaged in the cabinet-making and marble workshops. This chapter marks a further significant historical moment for Enzo Rossi, and for this reason a final section of the Perugia exhibition was given over to a display of works that came directly from the Istituto d’Arte Roma 2: some ceramic bas-reliefs by Dragoni and Nunzio, jewellery made in the goldsmithing workshop directed by Uncini, together with a tabernacle of astonishing modernity. No less significant was the presence of two monstrances, a crucifix and a candelabrum from the Church of the Visitation in Bolzano, designed by Uncini at the request of the parish priest Don Giuseppe Rauzzi, who was deeply attached to Enzo Rossi and shared a strong spiritual affinity with him. A most important loan that made it possible to see at first hand the extraordinary innovative capacity explored by the school and its artists. Likewise the marble and terracotta candelabra made in 1966 by Paolo Pasticci, in which one can clearly see the convergence between the development of the Minimalist idioms typical of the 1970s and the post-Cubist geometry handed down by the masters. The same may be said of the works by Felice Ragazzo, teacher of cabinet-making, some of whose mazzocchi, taken directly from Paolo Uccello, were on show, demonstrating how Renaissance geometric rationality had a direct line to the contemporary avant-gardes. The most important among these: Dualis Theoriae Documenta, already shown in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, in the edition curated by Maurizio Calvesi and devoted to the relationship between Art and Science (all the works described are published in the exhibition catalogue).

Enzo Rossi directed the school until 1978, leaving an indelible mark. He was, in fact, not only a painter, decorator and stage designer, but also a refined theorist. In 1980, freed from the burdens of the school, he had published the volume L’arte sacra oggi. Bellezza e verità, (Studium, Rome, 1980), in which he very carefully summed up his convictions on the renewal of this deep Italian tradition and where meaningful food for thought can still be found today.
Enzo Rossi died on 1 December 1998, the very day on which the exhibition celebrating the first thirty years of the school he had founded was inaugurated: Arte in cattedra. Ricerca e didattica a Roma, 1967-1997, promoted by the head, still in office today, Professor Mariagrazia Dardanelli, with the critical curatorship of Antonio Pinelli, in the halls of the Stenditoio at San Michele in Rome, where works by Rossi and by the artists who had directed the workshops were on display. In the premises of the school, on the other hand (today named after him), one could find the works of the many former students who went on to establish themselves after graduating. Linked to the same occasion is the book by Daniela De Angelis, Enzo Rossi e l’Istituto d’arte Roma 2, who in the catalogue of the Perugia-San Gemini exhibition contributed a valuable essay, bearing witness once again to the profound legacy that Enzo Rossi has left us.

Andrea Baffoni is an art historian and critic. Editor of the journal Contemporart (Modena), he earned a PhD in the History of Contemporary Art at the University of Perugia. A member of the Gerardo Dottori Archive, essayist and curator, in 2015 he published the volume Contro ogni reazione. Enrico Prampolini teorico e promotore artistico, Lantana, Rome.