Pieretto Bianco – The awakening of Venice, series of paintings for the 1912 Venice Biennale

The paintings are the preparatory works that the Trieste painter submitted for the approval of the organizers of the 10th Venice Biennale, obtaining a favorable opinion.

It is not, therefore, a simple collection of monographic works (which would be exceptional in itself), but an important work that allows us to point out the development of a famous, albeit poorly documented, artist. In 1912 Bianco was a man matured on the experience of the international art of the Biennials, as well as the counterpoint of Ca ‘Pesaro, therefore close to artists of the so-called School of Burano such as Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini, Ugo Valeri and especially Umberto Moggioli, with whom shared the studio in 1909-1910. It also seems to hear echoes of Italian painters such as Zanetti Zilla, Guido Marussig and Galileo Chini, foreign painters such as Frank Brangwyn, or others of the new generation in the limelight in Venice of the early twentieth century, in which colors and shapes were accentuated to become lyrical and emotional notes. , in complete harmony with the most up-to-date painting in the European capitals of that era.

Without the rhetorical forcing of heroic fascism, still far away, the configurations in these cartoons enhance the modern image of the working man. After the physical and moral breakdown in “social” painting of the nineties, and in the confidence in industrial progress also felt by the Futurists, in the new century this man emerges strong and energetic. The cycle is permeated by an atmosphere of great expectations, the same that can be felt in the Michelangelo figures of De Carolis and also in Boccioni’s hymn to the modern city. In short, the modern age is welcomed with enthusiasm: the accentuated contours of Bianco’s figures reflect the new spirit of vigor and energy.

Pieretto Bianco’s particular project is set in a celebratory atmosphere of the lagoon city, noticeable in Venice in the early twentieth century, in which various artists participated, interested in its conservation and promotion such as, for example, the reconstruction of the bell tower of San Marco, fallen on July 14, 1902, and proudly rebuilt by 1912. It is not known how the idea of ​​this grandiose initiative by Bianco was born, which was carried out in the grand hall of the Palazzo delle Belle Arti in the Giardini Pubblici in Venice. In 1901 Antonio Fradeletto, Secretary of the Biennale, had introduced decoration as an autonomous artistic genre and Bianco was certainly aware of the international exhibitions in Stockholm and Brussels, where great decoration was in evidence. The choice of the theme, then, underlines the return to Renaissance classicism revealed in the contemporary work of De Carolis, Sartorio, Bistolfi, Chini and Nomellini. Furthermore, at the great Roman exhibition of 1911, which among other things included many foreign artists, Ettore Tito presented La Gloria di Venezia. Finally, in the same year, the International Exhibition of Industries and Work was set up in Turin. In this historical context, therefore, we find the appropriate placement of Pieretto Bianco’s important project.