| |
He enrolled in the “Free School of the
Nude” at the Academy where he met Virgilio Guidi who, memner
of the jury at the end of the course, gave Lucatello a prize for a
drawing which “distinguished me as determined from the others,
for the vigorous and expressive possession of the object at the limits
of discovery”. It was his first important recognition, of which
he was very proud because he felt that in Guidi he had found a master,
a great painter with the depth of an authentic personality. For the
rest of his years in Venice he was to meet Guidi with the same unaltered
esteem, to gather from the man, in the subtlety of his wit, in the
often bitter judgements sometimes dictated by irritated partiality,
the mood of painting which was completely rooted in the particular
Italian history.
There is the Party. In those days the social and political tension
was such that the choices for young people were drastic, with no half
measures, with fiery certainty that was soaked more by romantic generosity
than by dialectic rationality. For Lucatello the opting for the Communist
Party was spontaneous, enthusiastic, from the gut. Running the Federazion
of Campo San Polo was the partisan Andrea, the future member of parliament
Mario Lizzero, a charismatic leader who was severe and intransigent
but a man in whose glance it was easy to discover his strength of
mind. And there was Gianquinto, the inspiring “red” mayor.
The young painter admired them all and followed them to the crowded
political meetings, to the marches on the bridge with the workers
who come down from Marghera. But also there was his intolerance to
bear the reductive logic of the Party, the often absurd protocol,
the bridlinging and the constriction of the imagination by rigid tactics. |
| |
|
