Giaguari is an oil on canvas by Arturo Castelli dated 1918, a point in time which gives the work further importance, being one of the last pictorial testimonies of the painter, who died the following year in Brescia, the city which was home to his entire artistic career. And it is precisely in this Lombard city that Castelli is known above all for his celebratory and monumental production, for the decorative panels executed in private villas, in the Credito Agrario bank and on the staircase of the Palazzo della Loggia. If in his public works the artist appears to us as a major interpreter and narrator, endowed with a speed of execution and with an effective and brilliant fluency in his use of colours, reminiscent of 16^th-century Venetian painting, in his easel works, with their infinitely more intimate and lyrical atmospheres, he adopted a symbolism which had nothing to do with the rhetoric of the official decorations and instead took refuge in the disturbingly evocative and decadent notes of a dark and carefully gauged use of colour. In the unpublished canvas Giaguari, Castelli engaged in a refined animal subject, very rare if not unique in his easel production. A nocturne in which the shadows are enveloping and endow the scene with a sense of mystery and tension. From the darkness emerge, as the only points of light, the nervous and vigorous bodies of the two jaguars who are pursuing each other, perhaps in a love dance between male and female, on the banks of a small lake in the heart of the forest. The mottled bodies that camouflage themselves in nature, their slow moves, their long tails that intertwine, together with the balance of the dark palette highlight the confident and calibrated touch of the brush. If in the rest of his production, Castelli adopted a loose painterly approach made up of broad almost expressionist touches, in Giaguari he chose a clearer and more rigorous language, following the veristic substratum of the composition, in which the animals are perfectly rendered in terms of their anatomy and behaviour.[1] But behind the apparent decorative pedigree of the painting, symbolist and allegorical aspects creep in permeating all of the painter’s poetics, pervaded by a melancholic vein linked directly to his personal story.

A feline that hunts under the cover of darkness, the jaguar is symbolically associated with the world beyond, a theme addressed in numerous works by Arturo Castelli. In the polyptych I Fiori (Flowers) –also found under the title I Fiori della Morte (The Flowers of Death) - which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1901 accompanied by the remarks “Do you think so much beauty could have dissolved in the putrid tombs? Open your eyes: do you see these flowers that never tire of sprouting again?”, Castelli assumed the role of a painter-poet who “transports [us] into the realm of dreams where the song of life exults, or the abandonment of a sadness close to death wails.” [2] A close friend of his, the Brescian peer and scholar Vincenzo Cesare Lonati, “a guide and comfort in his first conquests”, [3] a scholar of Greek, Latin, Renaissance literature and above all of Dante, is represented by Castelli in the evocative group portrait La Musica (Music) and shared with him a passion for a literary and spiritual impulse that ranged far beyond the mere conclusions of veristic poetics. The Virgins (Le Vergini), The Middle Ages (Medio Evo), and The portrait of the lawyer Paroli (Ritratto dell’avvocato Paroli)are just some of the paintings which Castelli filled with historical, musical, synaesthetic and literary references, and also the Jaguars which, in the icastic representation of their fleecy nocturnal gait seem to trace Dante’s words on the leopard: “light and swift exceedingly, which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!” encountered in the dark forest. Hence, the dichotomy between life and death, between dream and reality, which transpires from I Fiori and from such early works as Il Compianto (Grief) of 1891, seems to permeate the canvas in question, through a highly sophisticated game of meditations on the theme of impending death. Lived, nonetheless, in the symbolic key of an amorous courtship in a lush and ambiguous nocturnal nature, plainly touching on the oxymoronic theme of Eros and Thanatos, resolved in a Böcklin-like animal painting which makes this work the true swan song of its creator. Shortly thereafter – in 1919 in fact, Castelli died at only 49 years old, “in the full maturity of life, in the limpid freshness of the psyche, and perhaps on the eve of new victories of more intense and more rewarding work, when an insidious and fatal evil seized him...” [4] The transcendent symbolist atmosphere of this and other paintings meant that Castelli’s poetic soul was teamed several times with the decadent spiritualism of the French painters Eugène Carrière (1849-1906) and Aman Jean (1858-1936),[5] in a completeness of execution and a constant inspiration which made him a painter always inspired by the “song of the elegy”.[6]

Arturo Castelli, born in Brescia in 1870 and very soon orphaned of his father, found himself following his aptitude for painting amid much difficulty and economic hardships. Nonetheless, initially self-taught and then a pupil of the Moretto School, the young painter grew up in Brescia at the end of the 19^th century amid the gradual transition from post-romantic to Liberty aesthetics. Castelli interpreted these stylistic developments through painting with evocative and spiritual accents, of a Symbolist ancestry, which he adapted perfectly both to public decoration and to the most intimate and private easel paintings. “Intolerant of academic discipline” [7] he forged his own way with difficulty and with his own means in the artistic environment of Brescia and, together with painters such as Gaetano Cresseri (1870-1933) and Cesare Bertolotti (1854-1932), participated in the most important decorative cycles of the city at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, upholding the eclectic and versatile nature of allegorical painting, but giving it a singular lyrical and individual character.

The painter did not achieve fame and the respect of clients overnight, but made his successful début, at the age of twenty-seven, at the Venice Biennale in 1897 with La Musica, a work which, together with Le Vergini, at the Biennale of 1899 and I Fiori at the Biennale of 1901, defined from the beginning of his production a decadent tendency with melancholic notes, which are also to be found in the Giovine Madre con Bambino (Young Mother with Child) shown at the Verona Esposizione Artistica of 1900.

As a decorator, he first worked alongside Arnaldo Zuccari (1861-1939), to adorn the dining room of Villa Bertelli in Nozza di Vestone with frescoes. On this occasion, together with the master, he engaged in images of a clear Pre-Raphaelite mould, a test bench for future public works.

Later, he joined Gaetano Cresseri in the sacred decorations of the Parish Church of Bagolino, and then more important commissions, including the panels of the staircase of the Credito Agrario bank in Brescia, where he worked again with Cresseri and Carlo Chimeri (1852-1925). By Castelli are the three panels with personifications of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, oils of an imposing allegorical composition, with an underlying celebratory symbolism stylistically reminiscent of Michelangelo’s grandeur. Castelli’s poetic sensibility returned again in the decoration of the Banca Popolare Cooperativa, where he produced at least four canvases of which only one, depicting the Allegory of Abundance, has survived: characters taken from mythology, including Ceres, goddess of the harvest and fertility, and Mercury, god of commerce, business and earnings, who are represented among grape vines, amphorae full of wine and various types of fruit, in a dimension of prosperity unquestionably congenial to a newly born credit institution. Arguably his most significant public work dates back to 1902: the decoration of the staircase of the Palazzo della Loggia in Brescia with the central and most important panel Brescia Armata, in which, once again, a Renaissance inspiration returned, but in a Venetian key, since it seems above all to reflect on the majestic decorative pieces of Veronese. In the meantime, he continued his easel production, participating in 1906 in the National Exhibition of Milan for the Simplon Tunnel with L’Ora Nera (The Black Hour), an allegory reproduced in a 1915 lithograph in the magazine “Emporium” and praised by the author of the article for its “rare power of imagination” and the “firm, austere, contained vigour of style”.[8] In 1907, again in Venice, he exhibited Medio Evo and Milizia Antica (Ancient Militia), black and white works received positively by the critics. That same year, he became a member of the Civic University and in 1911 participated in a competition for the management of the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, where several of his works are preserved. In the meantime, he taught art subjects at the Moretto school, where he had also studied in his youth.

Still at the height of his career, Castelli died prematurely in 1919. Thirty years later, the Brescia Artistic Association dedicated an anthological exhibition to him, where works such as Paggio con Boccale (Page with a Tankard), some female portraits, the secessionist painting Venezia, and the dreamlike Lampada della Vita (Light of Life) were exhibited.

- Elena Lago

Bibliography:

L’ora nera di Arturo Castelli, “Emporium”, XLII, 1915, 250, p. 318.

I nostri Lutti. Arturo Castelli, in Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia di scienze lettere ed arti, Brescia, Tipo-Litografia Bresciana, 1919, p. 141-143.

G. Ronchi, Arturo Castelli, “Brixia Sacra”, X, 1919, 6, pp. 188-189.

Mostra postuma di Arturo Castelli, exhibition catalogue edited by P. Feroldi, Brescia, Associazione

Artistica Bresciana, 12 – 30 June 1949.

Brescia postromantica e liberty. 1880-1915, exhibition catalogue edited by B. Passamani, and F. Robetti

(Brescia, Museum Complex of Santa Giulia, June – August 1985), Brescia, Grafo 1985.