1. Education
When presenting the collection of parliamentary speeches by Carlo Levi, the President of the Senate at the time, Marcello Pera, quoted Ferruccio Parri, who had previously pointed out the difficulty of reducing the complex journey of Levi to a single biography. He observed that the unifying element in such a diverse range of experiences in painting, literature, journalism, militant criticism, and political engagement was the passion that drove him. As Pera noted: “[…] Commitment, combined with inspiration, leads him to broader horizons. He cares for children with malaria because he is a doctor. He paints portraits and landscapes of remarkable beauty because he is a painter. He writes profound and meaningful words about Man, History, himself, and us because he is a writer. And even when Carlo Levi is involved in politics, the artist within him is often evident, capable of sketching when he speaks from the parliamentary benches, just as he is capable of storytelling when he paints” (Levi, 2003, p. 11). His eclectic human journey has roots in the aspiration to an universal and unostentatious wisdom of the traditional Jewish culture and his unique personality. He believed in his expressive means and intellectual superiority, combining them with a rare empathy for people and animals. But he always considered himself, first and foremost, a painter. He saw figurative art as his “profession” and his other experiences, even creative ones, as a somewhat Terentian manifestation of his participation in every aspect of human existence.
Levi was born on November 29, 1902, as the second child of four siblings to Ercole and Annetta Treves, both belonging to cultured but not wealthy Jewish middle-class families in Turin. Ercole, however, had built a prosperous position through his fabric import business. Among Annetta’s siblings was Claudio Treves, one of the founders and prominent leaders of Italian socialism. To celebrate Carlo’s birth, Treves sent him a postcard featuring Giuseppe Mazzini, which Carlo’s brother, Riccardo Levi, recounted. Throughout his youth, Carlo displayed it above his bed. Riccardo writes, “My brother never had much political sympathy for Mazzini, but he effectively respected the wish for political and civic engagement that the postcard symbolized” (De Donato and D’Amaro, 2005, p. 23). Like many gifted young boys of his time, Levi had an exceptionally swift educational path, enrolling in the medical faculty at sixteen. Nevertheless, his time at Alfieri High School in Turin was crucial to his artistic development. During this period, he was able to interact with people who had exceptional cultural interests, which motivated him to start to explore painting in 1915. In 1918, he met Pietro Gobetti and began a collaboration with him, initially in the pages of Energie Nove and later, from 1922, in La Rivoluzione Liberale. The encounter with Gobetti marked a crucial turning point in the young Levi’s formative journey, not only in terms of politics but also artistically. It was Gobetti who introduced him to Felice Casorati. Twenty years older than Levi, Casorati was already a rather well-known painter when he moved to Turin with his family after the war. He had already exhibited at the Venice Biennales of 1909 and 1910 and then embraced the lessons of the Viennese Secession, which he had helped introduce in Italy through the Via Lattea magazine, published in Verona in 1914. As Levi wrote upon Casorati’s death in 1963, “His arrival was like a boulder falling into a pond, suddenly changing the city’s cultural life” (Levi 2001, p. 95). Levi became a student at Casorati’s painting school, where he learned the rigorous constructiveness and formal solidity that would become the hallmark of his artistic development. Although he quickly moved beyond the role of a student, he always maintained a strong friendship with his teacher, despite the age difference and Casorati’s sudden withdrawal from any political activities following his
In the mid-1920s, Levi, while still young, seemed to be uncertain about whether to pursue a career in the arts or in the sciences. Following his graduation with high honors in 1924, he assumed the role of assistant to Professor Micheli in the clinical medicine department, where he published notable experimental studies in the field of internal medicine. To enrich his medical studies, he traveled to Paris for the first of several stays. This experience greatly benefited his artistic growth and provided a European perspective to an emerging painter establishing his unique presence in the Italian art scene. In that same year, he made his debut at the Venice Biennale by exhibiting three paintings: Arcadia, Brother and Sister, Mother, and Lelle as a Child. During this period, Levi strengthened his political and cultural dedication by collaborating with La Rivoluzione Liberale until its closure in 1925. He also contributed to Gobetti’s cultural magazine, Il Baretti, until it was shut down in 1928. In 1927, Levi chose to focus solely on painting and left his medical career behind. He headed to Paris, where his connection to the French art world through his fiancée at the time, Vitia Gourevitch, helped him gain increasing recognition. Between 1928 and 1932, Levi divided his time between Paris and Italy, particularly Turin, where he was gaining influence in the Italian art scene. There, he participated in the so-called “Group of Six”, alongside Jessie Boswell, the only woman, Chessa, Galante, Menzio, and Paulucci. They were committed to searching for a modern artistic language that upheld a dialectical relationship with 19th-century Italian painting, engaging in a polemic with political connotations against Futurism. As Levi wrote in the introduction to the 1965 Turin exhibition catalog on the
The situation changes abruptly in February 1934 when two young Turin activists of the “Giustizia e Libertà” movement, namely Sion Segre Amar and Mario Levi, are arrested by the border police at Ponte Tresa while attempting to smuggle clandestine publications into Italy. Mario Levi, who successfully evaded capture and crossed the border once again, is not only the sibling of the future writer Natalia Ginzburg, but also of Paola, who is married to Adriano Olivetti. Additionally, Paola was romantically involved with Carlo Levi, resulting in the birth of their child, Anna, in 1937. The police then arrest Levi, along with others from the same group, at the Carceri Nuove prison in Turin. However, the cautious and composed artist, who has managed to conceal any potentially incriminating material in a secure location, does not succumb to the intense interrogations. He maintains that his relationships with those arrested are purely friendly and cultural in nature. Subsequently, he is released; however, OVRA continues its investigation into the movement with the aid of an infiltrated informant, the renowned writer Pitigrilli, also known as Dino Segre, a cousin of Sion Segre Amar. The infiltrator once again redirects the investigators’ attention to Levi, resulting in his arrest in May 1935. Nevertheless, Levi, due to reasons that demonstrate the artist’s exceptional foresight compared to ordinary political activists, has consistently distrusted Pitigrilli and made sure not to confide in him in any manner. Once again, after two months of interrogation, initially at the Carceri Nuove and then in Rome at Regina Coeli, no evidence has been found to justify the referral to the special tribunal. In fact, the special tribunal imposed severe sentences on Segre Amar, Leone Ginzburg, Vittorio Foa, Michele Giua, and even on the “repentant” Massimo Mila. Despite this, precautionary measures were proposed to Levi due to his suspected anti-fascist activities. Consequently, in August, he was sent into exile to Grassano, a town in the province of Matera. In just a month, however, the police department recommended his transfer to a more isolated location, as they found it challenging to keep the exuberant painter under control. In a few weeks, Levi received visits from Paola Olivetti and had the opportunity to get in touch with Vitia Gourevitch, who had long been married in Latvia. Levi’s intricate romantic life is marked by relationships that, except for the brief exile in France with Paola and Anna, never evolved into family. These relationships include a twenty-year affair with Linuccia, the daughter of the poet Umberto Saba and wife of painter Lionello Giorni, as well as another relationship with Luisa Orioli. These relationships, even after the intimacy ceased, never truly closed but rather deepened into emotional connections that endured. Therefore, Levi is sent to Aliano. It is widely known that exile was a turning point in Levi’s life. The empathetic and generous artist discovered an alternative world to modernity and rationality in Lucanian peasant life, which he approached with curiosity and respect. This kind of approach is not predictable, considering, for example, Pavese’s dramatical sense of strangeness experienced in Brancaleone. Levi’s experience became central in his human journey on various levels: philosophical, transforming and complementing the distinctive humanism that forms his interpretation of existence; political, refining and defining his vision of democracy based on Gaetano Salvemini, focused on the autonomy of elementary communities; artistic as well – which initiated his career as a writer with Christ Stopped at Eboli, and guided his subsequent path in painting.
Released following the amnesty granted to numerous exiles during the proclamation of the Empire, he returned to Turin, where he resumed his artistic activities. In the two years following his release, he presented numerous solo exhibitions in Milan, Rome, and Genoa and exhibited his paintings in December 1937 at the
5. “A Turin man from the South”
The extraordinary success of Christ Stopped at Eboli is evident, among other things, through a true “discovery” of Basilicata. This inspired a series of study expeditions, ethnographic trips by anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, and field reports by American sociologists such as Friedman, Pitkin, and Banfield. Additionally, it placed Levi at the heart of the post-war renewal of national cultural life, which soon took on an international dimension, primarily through cinema. Levi’s image outside Italy was significantly boosted by his 1947 trip to the USA with Parri, organized by an Italian-American cultural association to inform the American public about the conditions and needs of the new republican Italy. The trip became an extraordinary opportunity for cultural promotion, thanks especially to Max Ascoli, who introduced Levi to the American intellectual scene and secured him a collaboration with Life. This collaboration, followed by others with La Stampa and other Italian newspapers, led to one of Levi’s most characteristic activities in the 1950s: that of a modern “Grand Tourist.” Thus, he became a narrator and interpreter of a world marked by the Cold War, decolonization, and new media, revealing to the average Italian reader a perspective quite different from that of traditional travel literature and exoticism. This activity resulted in incisive reportage, some of which would develop into more substantial works, such as ” La doppia notte dei tigli on divided Germany and Il futuro ha un cuore antico on Soviet society. Above all, the trips to southern Italy stand out, from which works such as Le parole sono pietre and Tutto il miele è finitowere born. and in which the observer’s point of view also becomes that of an active subject. In fact, in these years Levi was by then a key figure of militant southernism, the animator of the movement of public opinion against the administrative and judicial persecution of Danilo Dolci in Sicily, the mentor of a whole new generation of southern intellectuals, especially those from Lucania, such as Giovannino Russo and especially Rocco Scotellaro. Like Dolci, the young poet would see Levi lined up at his side during the tormenting judicial events that would attempt to oppose his reforming efforts. With him, Levi made a trip to Calabria in December 1952, from which some of his most famous paintings were born, such as La porta del Sud, Melissa, Antonio e il porco, Il piccolo assegnatario, Nonna e nipote. The post-war fifteen-year period is, in fact, the one in which Levi painted most of his works of ‘social realism’, which in this case always tends to be shaded by a sense of the magical, and of ‘peasant’ subjects. These works would culminate first in the Lamento per Rocco Scotellaro“, painted after the poet’s death, and then in the large painting for the Basilicata pavilion at the Turin Expo for the centenary of Italy’s unification. However, it would be a mistake to forget that Levi’s artistic exploration during this period also involved various other styles: a series of mythological-themed paintings (Demeter and Persephone, Theseus and Ariadne, Narcissus), decades of work in lithography and sculpture on the theme of lovers, culminating in a famous solo exhibition at the “Il Pincio” Gallery in Rome in 1955, and especially portraiture. Portraiture was a constant in Levi’s work, and during these years, he painted many, including Italo Calvino (ten portraits), Anna Magnani, Ernesto Rossi, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Giorgio Amendola, Ilja Ehrenburg, Frank Lloyd Wright, David Siqueiros, and Pablo Neruda. Many models have shared memories of Levi’s curious portrait sessions, where he did not require the model to stay still and chatted and joked throughout. The Chilean poet himself left a testimony highlighting the mysterious charm of Levi’s personality: “While he painted me in the old studio, the Roman twilight slowly descended. […] I sank into darkness, but he continued to paint me. The silence eventually consumed me, yet he kept painting, perhaps my skeleton. Because there were two possibilities: either my bones were phosphorescent, or Carlo Levi was an owl, with the scrutinising eyes of the night bird.” (De Donato and D’Amaro 2005, p. 201).
Levi’s southern commitment represents in his political vision a key to a democratic renewal of the entire Italian society. This is why he tried with difficulty to find a political foothold in these years. In the years immediately following the birth of the Republic, he collaborated, also with a series of satirical drawings, with Aldo Garosci’s newspaper L’Italia socialista. Around the newspaper were gathered those shareholders who had not shared the Frontist choice after the party’s confluence with the PSIUP. In the convulsive period that followed the split at Palazzo Barberini, the group was close to Lombardo and Calamandrei’s Union of Socialists. The union proposed an alternative position both to the frontism of the reborn PSI and to participation in the centrist coalition advocated by Saragat’s PSLI, with which it presented a single list in the elections of 18 April 1948 (‘Socialist Unity’). After the triumph of the centrist coalition, however, Levi’s position became more explicit in his opposition to a political majority that he considered the expression of a conservative and culturally short-sighted social bloc. Dates back to the publication of L’Orologio his well-known metaphor on the magna divisio of Italian society into ‘peasants’ – the productive and intellectual classes – and, named after the podestà of Aliano, the ‘Luigini’, a social bloc that brings together parasitic classes located at different levels of the socio-economic pyramid. During the 1950s, therefore, Levi moved closer and closer to the opposition left. This also happened because his international experience at that time led him to move closer to third-party positions and a policy of opening up the West to dialogue with the Soviet bloc and the new realities (People’s Republic of China, the Non-Aligned movement) on the international scene. In 1958, he accepted a candidature for the Senate in Sicily, as an independent on the PSI lists, but was not elected. In the following years, as the PSI approached the government, Levi began to look towards the Communist Party. The PCI since 1953, wishing to position itself as the pivot of an alternative coalition to those centred on the DC, offered ‘hospitality’ in its lists to people of various political and cultural orientations. These characters should be the catalysts of such alliances, leading to the birth of the parliamentary groups of the Independent Left. In 1963, Levi was elected to the Senate in the Civitavecchia constituency. He remained in the Senate for two legislatures, as a member of the Public Education and Fine Arts Commission. His role, unlike that of other artists and exponents of so-called ‘civil society’ elected in Parliament, was never that of a mere ‘technician’, who spoke exclusively on issues pertaining to his own specific life experience. Considering his dimension as an artist and the particular perspective it gives to his analysis of reality, Senator Levi is an all-round parliamentarian and politician, whose memorable speeches in the debates on trusting governments in those years remain. For example, in the debate on the first Moro government, he criticises the government for its insufficient political base to truly renew social relations. At the same time, he shows interest in the political programme and affection for the members of the government with whom he shared important moments of his life. Another example is the increasingly mistrustful debates towards the successive re-editions of a centre-left that he sees reducing from ‘form’ to ‘formula’ (Levi 2003, p.96). Or, finally, like his analyses at the time, covering topics such as the defence of freedom of conscience and expression, landscape protection, international relations, new youth movements and much more. Troubled by health issues, Levi, who had been re-elected in the Velletri constituency in 1968, did not stand for the 1972 elections. In his final years, despite increasingly precarious conditions, including a period of blindness which served as the backdrop to his last literary work, the Quaderno a cancelli, he continued to work. In particular, in 1974, he completed his final piece (La Liberazione) as part of the group commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Fosse Ardeatine alongside Cagli and Guttuso, who created the first two pieces. He died on 4 January 1975.
Source: www.senato.it
