Giulio Romano Vercelli

Giulio Romano Vercelli (1871–1951) was an Italian painter.

Vercelli was born at Brusasco-Marcorengo, in Piedmont, of an instinctive and good dialectal poet. He spent his boyhood surrounded by the exclusively agricultural activities of his fellow countrymen, but the view of the Earth sown with labor to grow bread was not sufficient to appease his sensitive boyish eye; he searched the skies for the everchasing clouds, he gazed upon the flowers, he scrutinized the leaves upon the trees, he was driven towards distant horizons. The first infant cries of Art were born in his simple and elect mind, as poetry in his father's. In him, who grew up far away from the centers of artistic culture, sprung up the spontaneous buds of the love for good and beautiful things, for chromatism, for harmony; the need for expression grew inside his bosom. He was but twelve years old when he first started painting with colors he had prepared or scraped together himself as best as he could.

In the years immediately following, he decorated some small votive chapels in the surrounding countryside, awakening the admiration of his fellow countrymen, and, above all, of the Vicar of Marcorengo, who discovered the artist in him and started encouraging and protecting him.

Blending the requirements of everyday life with the demands of his Soul, conquering his own uncertainties and the diffidence of other people were no doubt the first and perhaps the most important difficulties the young painter had to overcome. He was able to overcome them with courage, by drawing strength and steadfastness from his limitless love for the humble and good things around him, from the purity of his intentions and the sphere in which his soul of a sincere artist was being formed.When 18 years old, following the imperative impulse of seeking for new horizons in new lands, and for new emotions in adventurous countries, he left Italy for South America. America! The great dream for the poor of the Old World, the New world awaiting the strong, the capable, the hardy; the rich country that had a need for everyone, even for young painters whose dreams were the carrier of a new civilization impulse. 50 years before, Giuseppe Mazzini had written: "For us, Art is an eminently social manifestation, and element of collective development which cannot be severed from the effect of all the other elements of Life".

The true artists did not betray the words of the great thinker during that second half of the XIX Century, so rich in vigor and prodigal of eminent painters. Painting walked hand in hand with Poetry and it scattered its beneficial pollen which was both aesthetic and social.

In young Giulio Romano Vercelli, poetry, which had been born with work in his beloved country, was always with him in the labors of his beloved Art. He landed in Brazil, and using the means this country could offer 80 years ago, he penetrated by foot and horseback the scarcely inhabited places where the Vicar who had encouraged him at Marcorengo was practising his Ministry. The Vicar had only just finished gathering funds for building his new parish church, and he gave Vercelli the appointment of painting the frescoes for it. Vercelli's fame spread rapidly, and he was invited to other countries. He left Brazil for Argentina and for Uruguay; then after two years' stay in Latin America, he returned to Europe, and settled in Paris for some time.

The forests, the prairies and the skies of overseas, the primitive life led in continuous contact with an often stone-hearted Nature tempered the young painter's Soul and body, completed his character and confirmed his love for simplicity, for clarity, sincerity and goodness, the fruits of which will be found in the artistic and moral behavior of all his life. Giulio Romano Vercelli lived in Paris during the years in which the overthrowing powers in all the Arts, and especially in Painting, were most violently loosened. The swift bound from the virgin lands of America to the most cerebral city in Europe did not upset the young artist, who had the opportunity of approaching and studying the great Masters of Impressionism and of the different Schools that flanked it. His friends and fellow painters were among the most daring, audacious and acclaimed painters of those times.

He learnt something from everyone; he listened to the opinions of all, to the advice and the instigations, but his spirit, which was intimately tied to the roots of the lands which had made him feel "poetry", remained unchanged. He went through all the experiences, he sustained all trials, but he refused to join any clan, to follow any school, to be subject to any influence; his personality was too strong to succumb to other persons' directives and to the dogmata of aesthetic expressions that did not spring from his strong and clean Soul. he returned to Italy, and settled in Turin, where he spent most of his life, he created his family, fought and won his artistic battles.

Turin did not take notice of him at first; but as years went by, thanks to the presence of his works in different collective Expositions, to the notoriety he achieved little by little, he began to be noted, and criticism started to be kind to him. The local critics, however, while bestowing acknowledgement and praise upon him, had not the courage to classify him as a Character, as the French critic George Avril did (a wonderful praise, for Characters are rare) and to define him as a "paysagiste par excellence, puissant coloriste, tachiste prodigieux" as "Revue Moderne" did. The reasons are easy to explain, as Vercelli's work defies immediate and "facile" classification; his work is that of an eclectic and capricious painter, who is not appeased by researches and is ever plunging into new experiences. He does not belong to groups, he does not follow tendencies, he loves artistic independence and solitude. In the pictorial climate of his time, he appeared as a rebel to the current canons of the brilliant, but provincial artistic attitude of the civilization in which he lived and worked the longest. He could not be classified only as a landscapist, portraitist or genre-painter, as he experimented with all these different expressions. In the pictorial climate of his time, which glittered with the names of Delleani, Cavalleri (to whom he was very close), Grosso and Follini, who rested upon the pleasantness of a subject which was nearly always limited to a specialization, Vercelli's work was kept in the shade, being judged too fickle, too varied and daring in the variety of subjects and language; his value was not recognized as being that of tending towards absolute autonomy-which had not yet been accepted in Turin-from the greatest representatives of French Painting, from the most prominent of whom-Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh and Matisse- he had absorbed much, while remaining, as we said before, completely free from any scholastic influence and tenaciously faithful to his own personality. However, our artist did not miss wide acclamation, and he gathered his laurels in the presentation of his works in Paris, at Marseille, From Nice to San Remo and Venice, from Rome to Milan, from South America, where the press classified him as "El celebre pintor Julio Vercelli", to many other cities that bought many of his works for Public Galleries and Museums, for private collections, and for the Royal House Collection. Meanwhile, in the Art and Poetry impregnated atmosphere of his family, his children grew up, following him passionately, learning the first rudiments of drawing, of chiaroscuro, of prospective, of color from him, longing to follow the honest pathway of their father.

So, the first Exhibitions were prepared, together with his beloved daughter Gemma, who had revealed herself as a marvel of sensibility, delicacy and talent ever since her girlhood. Gemma gave him his greatest satisfactions, which led him to believe that the Future was only hers, that he must work and live only for her. He started to set himself aside so as to let her shine in all her light, he began to worry less about his own production than his daughter's, he continued following her in her career, instead of having her follow his. At that time he could have returned to America, where he had been twice before in previous years for important works and personal Exhibitions, but continuing nevertheless in his pictorial researches from the romantic to the metaphysical ones, he gave up all pictorial activity of his own and personal lucre to dedicate himself to his family and the new artists who were budding luxuriantly from it. He never let anyone guess whether he left the burden of his renouncement; he proclaimed his pride of being the father of a complete and universally acknowledged artist. In the meantime, also his son Renato started successfully undertaking the pathway indicated by his father; comforted by these inner joys, Giulio Romano Vercelli could mitigate the memory of many sorrows that Life had strewn his path with, above all the loss of his thirteen years old daughter Wally, and the death of another son, Aroldo, whom he lost during the war.

He died in 1951, and with him died a noble figure of a man and artist.

To see paintings http://www.3vercelli.com