Piero Persicalli began his studies at the Munich Academy in 1909, as a student of Habermann and Knirr. After a brief stay in Rome from 1912 to 1913, he moved to Vienna where he made his debut at the “Art Club”. In these early formative years, the artist became seduced by the more visionary aspects of Munich and Viennese secessionist aesthetics,[1] a key element that we find in all his later art.

In these same years he exhibited at the Salon des Independents in Paris, After the First World War he was present at the first Rome Biennale and at the Fiorentina Primavera in 1922 with Cardi by the sea and Contadina dei dintorni di Zara. Carlo Carrà wrote that Persicalli, “belongs to that category of our artists who have matured their art abroad.”[2]

The year 1925 seems to have marked a peak of Piero Persicalli’s success, who became famous at a national level. In the first edition of Comanducci’s dictionary of painters (1934) he is described as a “lively colourist with a freely divisionist technique”.

 

This definition is spot-on. The distinctive line of research of Piero Persicalli's art seems split in two: on the one hand a firm mastery of the Divisionist and late Divisionist canons, on the other a marked decorative and experimental tendency. It is truly incredible how these two souls never strayed far apart, in fact, in Persicalli’s works they blend to such an extent that they seem a continuation of each other.

 

In 1925, Strazzacavei, a well-known journalist and critic of the magazine Marameo!, stated that “Persicalli is Dalmatian but knows how to be Japanese, a Divisionist, and when it suits him even a diver to grasp from life those magnificent specimens of stylized fish ...”[3]

In fact, fishy subjects were very much present in Persicalli's works from 1920, underlining his closeness to Art Nouveau. In those years, the artist had many models to refer to, including certainly the numerous fish-themed woodcuts by Utagawa Hiroshige and other Japanese artists whose works were part of the collection of the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. It is not surprising that Persicalli, an artist with an openly decorative approach, looked to Japanese art. The insertion of fish fauna in an exquisitely decorative and stylized formal context can be found in Ver Sacrum, the refined official magazine of the Viennese Secession, where the delicate and innovative illustrations of Koloman Moser (fig. 1) or Nora Exner (fig. 2) often appeared.

 

 

Fig. 1 - Koloman Moser, Sfregamento di trote, disegno per tessitura, due toni, illustration for “Ver Sacrum”, no. 4, April 1899

 

 

 Fig. 2 - Nora Exner, Fische, woodcut in two colours, “Ver Sacrum”, no. 14, 15 February 1903, p.77