(Zara 1886, Cantu 1977)

Piero Persicalli was born in 1886 in Zara, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a wealthy family of Italian origin and culture in the unique cosmopolitan setting of Venice. In 1909, he enrolled at the Academy in Munich, where he studied painting with Habermann; He then moved to Vienna, where he remained for two years and achieved his first exhibition success; In 1914, his works were exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants and received praise from influential critics.
The outbreak of World War I interrupted his career, which nevertheless restarted with momentum in Italy, beginning in 1920, with participation in a sequence of prestigious exhibitions, such as the First Rome Biennale in 1921 and the Primaverile Fiorentina in 1922. In 1924 he was in Milan, at Bottega di Poesia, with an exhibition that revealed him as a talented “paesista” of enchanted and poetic Dalmatian seascapes, as judged by Carlo Carrà. In 1925 he met with success in Trieste in a solo show where he exhibited drawings of peculiar originality, freshness, and dynamism, united by the depiction of fish, a subject that the artist would pursue in later years with variety of techniques, registers and happiness of outcome.

The painful and final relocation to Como in 1929, from a Zara that, acquired by the Kingdom of Italy after World War I, experienced a complex and dramatic season in its history, saw Persicalli open a studio of artistic designs for textiles, which grants him the ease he needs to cultivate painting without chasing the market and reconciles him with the idea, breathed in the German milieu, of the absence of barriers between pure and decorative art. Como abstractionism will not capture his soul: his will be “singing” out of the chorus, consistent in declining art to the end in the figuration of reality, pervaded after World War II by a subtle melancholy.

Piero Persicalli passed away in Cantù in 1977.