Reasons behind a commitment
My name is Bruno Rosaia and I am one of the four grandchildren of Bruno Cordati. I regularly visited Barga throughout my childhood and adolescence, together with my brother Beppe: in the summer, we used to spend a month at our grandfather’s house and often used to visit him in his studio. At his death, his two daughters, Luigia, my mother, and Bruna, committed themselves, along with their respective families, to organize the exhibitions that he had refused for a long time: hence the exhibitions in Barga, Florence, Pisa, Sofia, and Bergamo, held in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century, and the establishment of the Casa Cordati Museum.
My grandfather Bruno worked hard in his long life and left a significant heritage, which we can divide into three parts: one part is owned by my mother Luigia Cordati Rosaia, one part is owned by my cousins, heirs of Bruna Cordati Martinelli, and one part is distributed in the houses of the citizens of Barga and the Lucca area who loved his painting, and in public and private institutions, in various parts of Italy and abroad.
The purpose of this site is to spread knowledge of Bruno Cordati’s work, contribute to the study and documentation of his work, and provide a contribution to the devolpment of a complete archive.
undertook this work supported by the friendship and expertise of Marzia Ratti: using my mother’s memory to reconstruct some episodes of my grandfather’s life, we embarked on an ongoing adventure, in search of the numerous works in private and public ownership and original documents that tell his life and artistic choices. The response we are receiving confirms the usefulness of the endeavor: the donation by my mother of two works to the Ragghianti Foundation in Lucca and the warm welcome from the people of Barga, both from public and private institutions, comfort us and testify that it is worth continuing the research and study.
I INVITE people and institutions who own works by Bruno Cordati and wish to contribute to the formation of the Bruno Cordati Archive to write to the address brunocordatiarchivio@gmail.com to report their availability to the set-up of the documentation of Cordati’s works, which will take place according to mutually agreed-upon methods.
Bruno Rosaia, March 2023
Our journey for Cordati
Dedicating a website to the work of Bruno Cordati is not only a welcome tribute from those who loved him greatly as a father or grandfather, but also a concrete action to give voice and images to a significant author of the Twentieth century, reconstructing his essential stages to restore him to current perception in his complex and lengthy story. This is in the conviction (more than hope) that only by piecing together the scattered fragments of the many, valuable voices of the Twentieth century can we truly understand this century in a more complete way and not confined by the conventions of manuals, often simplistic and of little use for a global understanding of artistic and historical phenomena. Because Cordati is a man and an artist deeply immersed in the events of the Twentieth century and the profound crises that have crossed it, and all his production blatantly demonstrates this. Two World Wars, one experienced on the front lines, the other suffered between Barga and Bagni di Lucca; first a period of great exhibition energy between the twenties and thirties, followed by years spent abroad, full of vital experiences; a second period, from 1947 until his death, of total withdrawal from the public scene by choice, perhaps paid dearly in the dimension of historiographic understanding. His painting, reinterpreted today in all its parts, thanks to this website, with an abundance of known works and many unpublished ones, reveals the succession of times and linguistic seasons of a complex era, which he interpreted phase by phase in a continuum of coherent and tireless artistic research. Like every true artist, Cordati never stopped at his own stylistic features, not even those that had most pleased the clientele; he did not like to quote himself, nor to retrace his steps because it was the internal tension of the ‘craft’ – ideational/compositional/expressive – that interested him more than anything else. His aim was internal recognition, experimentation, and a daily challenge with himself.
It is well known that Cordati almost never dated his paintings, but the evolution of his language itself reveals the different ways he worked, almost decade by decade. For this reason, with Bruno Rosaia – the grandson who bears not coincidentally the name of his grandfather and who was the true driving force behind this operation – we wanted to attempt a reconstruction of the artistic journey, choosing chronological anchors that, albeit rare, exist or have been traced by us thanks to the review of biographical and historiographic sources, as well as based on the stylistic observation of his abundant production and tracing every memory still alive in the memory of direct family members, especially that of the daughter Luigia, the mother of Bruno and Giuseppe. A provisional proposal for general periodization to contribute to the historicization of Cordati. We immediately affirm that doubts and uncertainties persist, and therefore it is a work in progress subject to adjustments, corrections, and suggestions that we hope may come precisely from the public and free dissemination of the site’s contents. From which we also expect to be able to track down paintings and useful information for the continuation of studies, especially from the families of Barga who surely preserve them carefully.
If I have been able to learn more about the valuable profile of an artist and the biography of a man, I owe it to my friend Bruno Rosaia, thanks to whom I have shared pleasant moments of curious and dynamic preparation of this site and thanks to whom I have come into contact with many people from Barga and Lucca, places that I can now say I know better and love more. Finally, a thought to the dear friend and colleague Paola Paccagnini, who prematurely passed away in 1995, to whom we owe the first systematic and rigorous studies on the painter, following whose footsteps we have inserted ourselves to continue the journey on Cordati.
Marzia Ratti, March 2023
Acknowledgments
We thank
Paolo Bolpagni, Director of the Ragghianti Foundation, for the suggestions and encouragement that have comforted and motivated us;
Cristiana Ricci, President of the Ricci Foundation ETS of Barga, for the effective and competent action of research and enhancement of Cordati’s work;
Gino Franchi, President of the ANMIG of Lucca, for the documentation of the decoration of the ceiling of the Assembly Hall, at the Casa del Mutilato of Lucca;
Antonella Tomei, teacher at the Artistic Music and Dance High School Augusto Passaglia of Lucca, for the research of Cordati’s works and the documents preserved in the Archive of the School;
all the public institutions that have collaborated by making their works and documentation available: the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Umberto Prencipe Archive and Fund, the National Museum of Palazzo Mansi in Lucca, the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation in Lucca, the Municipality of Barga.
A special thanks goes to Carla Conforto Pagano, for the donation of drawings and sketches by Bruno Cordati; we also thank, for collaborating in the reconstruction of episodes of Bruno Cordati’s life and in the search for works in the territory: Silvia Redini, Paola Pia, Pier Giuliano Cecchi, Cristiana Ricci, Umberto Sereni, and all the owners of works by Bruno Cordati who have made themselves available to photograph or have photographed the works in their possession.
