Painting on panel by Giuseppe Caselli, titled "Pompeian Design".
Panel dimensions 66 x 98 cm within a large gilded frame.
Giuseppe Guglielmo Umberto Caselli, known as Pino (Luzzara, 5 July 1893 – La Spezia, 19 December 1976), was an Italian painter.
Born in 1893 in Villarotta di Luzzara (Reggio Emilia), he trained at the Free School of Nude at the Academy of Florence. Returning to La Spezia, where he had lived since childhood, he was a pupil of Del Santo and Discovolo.
He came into contact with the artistic environment gravitating around the new magazine L'Eroica of the Spezia writer Ettore Cozzani and dedicated himself to xylographic engraving. In 1913 he met Lorenzo Viani.
During the First World War he was taken prisoner and interned in the Mauthausen prison camp in Austria; from this experience he drew numerous works foreshadowing the drama of the subsequent conflict.
His painting, initially inspired by the early Divisionist experiences of the early 20th century, reached a personal expressionism, close to the Austrian innovative movements, but also to the poetics of Viani. Many of his works are inspired by memories of imprisonment.
With works of aeropainting, in 1933 he exhibited at the Premio del Golfo organized by F.T. Marinetti and returned to participate in many of the subsequent editions.
Very attached to La Spezia, he painted the many aspects of the city and its province, of Lunigiana and the nearby Cinque Terre in particular.
The Centro Allende of La Spezia dedicated a posthumous anthological exhibition to him in 1981.
