We the Italians October 3, 2014 - 44 | Page 36

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Italian Art:

Riccardo Perucolo

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 interestingquality.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 40sas a successful painter. Nothing is known of his artistic training: at that time, for sure Coneglianois 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.