WTI Magazine #44    2014 October, 1
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

As we've already said many times, the feeling that the artists from previous centuries were people with no personal life, no eccentricity and no psychosis, just beautiful souls dedicated to aesthetics and to their art, is a totally wrong perception, largely due to the distortion of nineteenth-century art criticism, which tended to filter out as heroic lives which, however, were anything but epic. This time we will tell you a particularly fictional story.

A few years ago, during the restoration of the "wells", the terrible Venice prisons located in the Palazzo Ducale, in "cell X" were discovered graffiti of a really interesting quality. The case was emblematic to reopen a story lost in time but well known by the sharpest Venetian art historians: the story of Riccardo Perucolo, a painter from Conegliano.

He was born in 1515 and emerged in the Venetian hinterland in the 40s as a successful painter. Nothing is known of his artistic training: at that time, for sure Conegliano is a crossroads of great masters with many commissions, and Riccardo himself is attending the Venetian artistic life, where he marries his wife Antonia Voltolina.

Riccardo is famous in Conegliano, known for his talent and his hard and rebellious attitude. He spends time with a priest, Gottardo Montanaro, who will then be marked as a renegade, making him to dangerously get close to Lutheranism, and then in trouble.

In 1549 Riccardo is arrested on charges of heresy, and imprisoned in Palazzo Ducale. Although the main aim of the operation is to shut down the heretic priest, Riccardo gets set up but he manages to be exonerated through an abjuration, probably extorted by torture. He is then able to return to Conegliano with the task of public penance, to be exercised every Sunday in front of the village church. But the bishop and his vicar, two fanatics convinced that heretical people and organizations had to be broken through "the warning example of the fire", set again their eyes on Perucolo right in the summer of 1567, when anti-clerical and anti-Catholic booklets circulate in large quantities. A relapse would cost Riccardo his life. A false accusation, a daring escape in Cadore, a capture and perhaps extreme torture send him to the stake, in the spring of 1568.

The dramatic graffiti of "cell X" are his own, probably just outlined in an attempt to exonerate himself from the charge; while the splendid paintings of the upper hall of Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano leave a testimony of his high artistic standards, that make his tragic end even more bitter.

Two doubts remain yet not completely solved, even after the book written by the Director of palazzo Ducale who has witnessed the discovery of the graffiti in "cell X": why, despite his beliefs, Perucolo painted Christian subjects he hated that much, as saints and the trinity? And then, was his client close to his ideas, or he was such a great performer to completely be able to separate the craftsman from the real himself?