Michele Cesaratto at Acappella

Artist: Michele Cesaratto

Exhibition title: PINGENDO

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: November 24, 2023 – January 15, 2024

Photography: © Danilo Donzelli / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Acappella, Naples

To talk about Michele Cesaratto’s work it is essential to take into consideration the two cities in which he studied: Florence and Venice. Cities, inextricably linked to his work, which represent two significant moments of Italian art: the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The painting that developed between these two periods and places has a very significant influence on Michele’s work. An influence that does not only concern formal and technical aspects of the image, but extends to the approach to painting that Michele shares with some artists of those times.

Moving from Fra Angelico to Pollaiolo, from Pisanello to Gentile da Fabriano and also considering the so-called “primitives” in general, clear and sometimes evident common characteristics emerge.

In fact, despite the elegance and refinement of their works, often with a sacred background, a naive dimension always emerges in the painting (ingenuo, in-genui, self-generated and therefore pure). This naivety is reflected especially in the delicate and simple details and inventions as well as in the totally new and personal attention towards nature and its phenomena: think of Pisanello’s corpus of drawings – largely composed of studies on animals – or the replacement of gold background with the landscape of the painters mentioned, in which the Christian symbolic element is eluded in favor of attention to the landscape.

In Michele Cesaratto’s painting, which draws heavily from nature and everything that surrounds him, this same ancient naivety is found, sometimes characterized by ironic, almost funny nuances.

The attention to the landscape is also taken up by Chinese art and culture, which has always been a source of constant interest and research for Michele.

Chinese painting is the one that perhaps gave the most importance to the landscape, placing the landscape painter on the same level as the inspired poet, to the point of transforming it into a spiritual exercise: the paintings on silk scrolls were, in fact, enclosed in precious caskets and discovered only in intimate situations, in the same way one could contemplate a sacred object or read a poem.

Thus, Michele’s works appear as a union between these two worlds – ancient Italian painting and Chinese painting – and therefore ask for meditation before them, as if it were a fourteenth-century Italian prayer diptych or a painted silk scroll in China..

However, associating these two elements is not impossible: Mario Bussagli, a well-known Italian orientalist, offers us this singular hypothesis in this regard: “Bernard Berenson already noted that the spirituality of Chinese painting rarely finds a correspondence in Italy, but, if it does, this happens in Sienese painting of the 1300s and early 1400s, for the emotionality and mystical impetus of the people of Siena. But if Berenson wanted to establish a spiritual affinity without implying historical relationships, remember that it is not at all impossible that paintings from the Sung era or the very early Yuan period suggested to Simone Martini not only the characteristic dimensions of his large fresco representing Guidoriccio da Fogliano at siege of Montemassi, but perhaps also the same treatment of the landscape, of the fences, of the signs (..) Apart from the very different spirit that animates Simone’s works, a clear expression of an Italian medieval sensibility, the dimensions correspond to those of a horizontal scroll painting (the height is one third of the width) while the correspondence of the details with similar solutions used by Chinese artists are such as to suggest an imitation”

-Leonardo Devito