Conversation with Silvano Campeggi                  

Beverly Allen

Bagno a Ripoli, Italy
January 17, 2007

Christine Shapiro and I have come to the Campeggi home in Bagno a Ripoli, a beautiful village just outside Florence. Ten minutes from the city, we find ourselves in a Tuscan landscape worthy of Lorenzetti. We’re here to choose the works of Silvano Campeggi, to be included in a Point of Contact exhibit programmed to coincide with the 2007 Syracuse International Film Festival.
 
Aging magnificently and with a twinkle in his eye, Campeggi is simultaneously the most passionate and the most commercially astute of artists. Greatly enamoured of his native city, he identifies with its Renaissance heyday.  To know him today is to see a twenty-first century version of the Florentine painters, sculptors and architects who invented the patronage system—who knew, that is, how to commercialize their art, though not all succeeded as well as has Campeggi.
 
When still a young man, Campeggi left Florence for Rome, where MGM took him on to paint film posters in his already distinctive style. His departure from the film industry some years later coincides with the advent of the computer design technology that would entirely displace the traditional painting of film posters, but Campeggi—Nano to his friends (and from now on, to me too)—sees it differently.

We carried on this conversation in his home studio, with his wife Elena an intermittent participant, as Christine and I chose pieces to ship to Syracuse. Then Nano drove Christine and me to visit his sister’s home, where she fed us panettone and espresso. We crossed the street to his daughter’s house and spent another half hour in his storeroom, where paintings of all sizes were stacked and balanced everywhere. The last twenty minutes of this conversation took place in Nano’s car as he drove us back to our pensione in Florence.
A sense of time rushing away from us tinged the entire morning, which I would willingly have prolonged for the pleasure of Campeggi’s company and the violet serenity of Tuscany’s January hills. Violet like the shadow on Marilyn’s eyes.

 

N:  When I had a show at the Two River Film Festival, The New York Times wrote something very true: “His iconic portrait of Monroe’s eyes and lips against a white background, some believe, influenced Warhol’s version.” I knew him, but I didn’t know who he was. Later, a friend told me. Warhol had come here with I forget which university, maybe Syracuse, to take an art course. In 1956 and 1958 he was taking a window dressing course, and I remember having met him. I hosted American students from time to time. This kid—Warhol—asked me, “So you work for the movies?  How do you get to work in the movies?  Did you do a portrait of Marilyn?” That was him, Warhol.
He shows us a poem some friends wrote about him as a birthday gift.  It calls him a “son of the Renaissance.”

B:  Look, a stone Marilyn!

N:  This is part of my Renaissance discourse.  And this one is my portrait-- with a portrait of Lorenzo dei Medici inside it. I laid my self-portrait over his portrait, one on top of the other. Someday I’ll do an exhibit entirely of my portraits. When I was young people said I looked like David.
            Let me explain what the movies used to be. Today, first-run features show for maybe ten days and then disappear. Once, films ran for a long time. In Italy, you can screen a film for twelve years. After that you need a new license. We did that three times for Casablanca. So twelve plus twelve plus twelve. . . and I made a new poster for it each time. 

I gaze out at the landscape.

B:  It’s so beautiful.

N:  We’re four miles from the center of Florence here, and you can’t build anything because the municipality protects the land. Even the hills are a monument.

B:  Back to your art, how do you see the relationship between the commercial aspect of your work and its aesthetics?

N:  The relationship is hard to understand.  I was very young—22—when I took my first steps in film work.  I had the good luck to be part of a group of Florentine artists like Franco Zeffirelli and Bolognini, a great director. You know Zeffirelli? We’re the same age. It was wartime, we were young, and we got together as artists. Franco kept saying that Florence was too small for us.

B:  Were you soldiers?
N:  No, no, not yet. The war had begun, but we were still too young. I’d been taking a flight course, and since I was still enrolled in that, I didn’t go into the army. Zeffirelli said we should get away from Florence so we could sell our culture, our sensibility. Because in Florence everyone’s smart, everyone’s accomplished. Well, not exactly, but everyone feels Florentine and very important.

B:  And so they don’t take to new things very easily.

N:  Something new, different, well, they’re always critical.  I was the first, after the war, to leave Florence and go to Rome to meet a great poster designer, Luigi Martinati, whose mother was Florentine and who had studied in Florence.  “Son,” he said, “a drawing is something one can see.  If you draw well, people see that immediately.  If you write poetry, one person might understand it and another, not.  But anyone can say whether a drawing is beautiful or ugly. So I went to the Scalera Film Company where they were making Black Eagle. I pitched my idea and they bought it. That was the first poster I ever did, and the film was the biggest moneymaker of 1946.  So I was suddenly someone who brought good luck, which is very important.  This was the time when MGM and the other American film production companies came back into Italy after the war.  I worked for them for almost thirty years along with MGM, the lion, everyone.

B:  The lion?

N:  The animal, the MGM lion.  The two oldest characters at MGM are me and the lion!  It was a lot of work.  For me it was a job.

B:  Since it was a job, did you ever have difficulty, the way a director might, making your vision correspond to the film’s image?

N:  Yes.  The directors told me, “Sex and action!”

B:  This rule seems to have lasted for the entire history of commercial film.

N:  Always.

B:  So this brings me to another question, that of. . .

N:  I haven’t finished.

B:  Oh, I’m sorry!

N:  Sometimes, when I had a great idea, something beautiful, more artistic than commercial, and it got printed and then the publicity director, who now and then came to Italy, saw it, well, he’d invite me to lunch and say, “Great, great, but sometimes you work for your own catalogue and not to sell the film!” 
See, even stupid people buy film tickets, even they have to go to the movies.  If you do something really intelligent, if it’s beautiful, it isn’t within everyone’s grasp.  For Ben Hur they were wondering if they should use my horses.  They said, “We’ve spent millions of dollars for the scenes, the actors and everything else, and all you put in the poster are these four horses!”  So I told them, “But look at what a gorgeous poster they’ll make!”  And they used it.  Afterward they thanked me.  You see?  People say it’s the most beautiful film poster in the world!

B:  Well, this too brings me to my next question about the iconographic value of your work.  Those horses, even though they don’t show the Ben Hur set, function as a symbol of the chariot race, the heart of the film, and also power, strength, another central theme.  Do you intend the same sort of iconographic symbolism in your paintings of women?

N:  Yes.  All this is a construct of ideas.  They always called me an innovator and I always told them, “The more things you put in a poster, the less legible it is, the less people will remember it.”  For me, the poster has to be a synthesis of the film--an idea, actually.  Many times they told me, “But you just don’t want to work very much—you paint half a face, half a mouth.”  And I said to them, “Excuse me, the poster has to be readable with a quick glance.  You drive past in your car, you see it for a second, and it stays in your mind.”  This is a poster.  MGM and other companies were making two kinds of posters.  The first was for the first-run films, a poster people in cities would see as they drove by.  The other was a poster for the small towns, where it would stay up in the piazza and people would come to look at it again and again.  The second poster was the more descriptive one, the more narrative one.  I never liked it.  They told me I didn’t want to work much, but it’s not true.  For me that second poster just didn’t work.

B:  Because it was lacking aesthetically?

N:  Yes.  It could just as well have been a photomontage.  There was no need to make a drawing for it.  But a drawing could capture much better a scene, a moment, a synthesis.
B:  How do you think of the relationship between drawing and the art of cinematography?

N:  I’ve always been a good drawer.  I’ve always loved portraits.  I always painted portraits of my friends.

B:  You started out drawing portraits of American soldiers.

N:  Yes, because I went to work right after the war.  I’d volunteered for the army.  Later I was in the Naval assault force.  I did the training and was supposed to carry a bomb on my back and attach it underneath a ship. I was in a swim club where everyone was joining this branch of the military.  It was a Kamikaze sort of unit, but, since our training took a long time, I signed up thinking the war would end before I finished it.  It was like a sports club, where you had to learn things like how to use scuba gear without letting any bubbles come to the surface.  And they always told us we had to die, we had to die.  But it wasn’t enough to die.  We had to die with honor.  By now we were used to the idea of dying, really.  It’s incredible.  I loved life all the more because it was such a gift, since I had been convinced I would die.  Then I came to Florence to take an exam, and the Allies liberated Rome. 
At that point I deserted.  I hid out and waited for the war to end.  It was a very hard time.  Right after the liberation of Florence, the American mother of one of my pals, who had a postcard store in the Piazza del Duomo, told me that an American Red Cross woman was looking for someone who could draw or paint.  So I went to the American troops’ convalescent hospital to draw the soldiers’ portraits.  It was great, but I stupidly didn’t learn English.

B:  What interests you about the human face?

N:   It’s a particular moment, a moment of contact, that lets you understand a person’s soul.  I use very quick strokes, very quick, and I don’t even look much at what I’m doing, so I manage to put my subject at ease.  I understand the particularity of the person, and then, with a few strokes, I capture it.

B:  We could say, in fact, that since you leave the background white, you don’t draw the social context, you don’t draw the history. . .

N:  I make the face emerge.

B:  You get the individuality.

N:  Sometimes, with only a few strokes, a life emerges, as if it were the person’s soul.

B:  So the soul becomes a person, is that it?  And for this you leave out the social environment, the context—you charge the image of the person over all else.

N:  Yes. Also because honestly I’ve never given all the rest much importance.  You see it in my paintings of the Palio [the famous medieval-style horse race in Siena], where I’ve barely hinted at something of Siena itself.  Very little. Nothing. Because for me the face lives one moment in its environment.  The environment moves, the light changes, everything changes. But the face, no.  I try to extrapolate this face from all the rest.  I also draw landscapes, but I don’t love landscapes.

B:  No, you love woman!

N:  Yes. I love woman.

B:  What do you love in her?

N:  The first drawing I ever did of a woman was of my grandmother.  I was thirteen or fourteen, and it turned out very well.  Then I drew my mother.  I always had a lot of trouble drawing my mother because it always seemed to me that something was missing.  I couldn’t get her in a few strokes.  Later I came to know woman as woman.  For me it was all about the possibility of contact.

B:  How so?

N:  A chance to be close to her, to understand her.

B:  Literally?  To get close to that particular woman you were painting?

N:  Out of curiosity.

B:  Not to seduce her?  Or also to seduce her?

N:  No.  More to be seduced by her.  That was the idea I was getting at.

B:  Did it work?

N:  Yes, it worked.

B:  How often?

N:  It was amazing. Elena, who checks everything on her computer, reads all my crises according to my zodiac sign.

B:  Crises?  Okay.  So a very intimate rapport in a literary sense?

N:  Yes, but also spiritual, as a concept, a vivacity of thought, an interpretation of the world.

B:  For me, an American and a feminist, it seems a pretty convenient dynamic.

N:  You’re a feminist in the right way, because I don’t like it when people go too far with feminism.

B:  I see. But I want to know the effect feminism has had on your relationship with woman.

N:  Then you have to remember that I got married when I was 34 to Elena, who was 21.  I had waited until she came of age. It was a very beautiful relationship and also a
difficult one because she was just a girl. We were neighbors. 

B:  I asked you about the effect of feminism on your relationship with woman. You spoke to me about marriage. What effect has marriage had on you?

N:  A positive one. I’ve always tried to make sure that Elena also had a positive experience of marriage.

B:  So you’ve never changed your way of working when you make portraits of female subjects?

N:  No.  I renew myself naturally, without trying.  I’ve drawn the most beautiful women in the world, I’ve tried to characterize them, to make them beautiful but not too beautiful.  I drew them and I felt good.

B:  Later I’d like to talk about the effect that computers have had on your work, but now I’d like to know more about the relationship between feminism and marriage.

N:  I taught a course in Visual Design in the School of Architecture at the University of Florence.

B:  But what about feminism and marriage?

N:  To tell the truth, the older I get, the more I am on the side of women.  Of accomplished women, women who want to give it their all.

B:  I see.  But in your art women have this iconographic, almost transcendental function.

N:  I go back and forth in time.  I go back to the Renaissance in order to understand how they looked at the women of antiquity.  I love Botticelli, his Venus.  You know who she was?  She was Amerigo Vespucci’s sister!  They were neighbors, and she’d always been Botticelli’s model.  They’re all buried in Florence—Botticelli, Amerigo Vespucci and his sister, in the Church of Ognissanti, in the piazza where the Grand Hotel is.  I can’t remember her name, but everyone knew her.  You see what Florence was like once upon a time?  What it was like even before the war, with Zeffirelli, who always said we had to get out?

On the island of Elba I have a house by the sea in a little village at the foot of a granite mountain.  The coast is made of huge granite rocks, and many of them look like human figures, as if they were sculptures.  I’ve idealized this and turned it into a human figure [showing one of his “rock” paintings].  But of course it began as an idea.  The granite is made of all these little dots.  I used a method that old lithographers used.  Even Lautrec, since he didn’t have photomechanical reproduction technology, sprayed color with a brush to produce shadings.

B: You sign your poster paintings “Nano,” but you sign your paintings since then “Campeggi.”  Does this mean you’ve forgotten film?

N:  [pulling out another painting] This is a Madonna and child of Piero della Francesca.  But I’ve changed it.  Now it’s Father and Child.  I put in a relationship that no longer exists between the generations.  He’s in the shadow, and I’ve even put sunglasses on him.  He’s barely touching the baby.  The relationship is different—he’s not putting up with any stories.  This paternity is one with the sun and the moon, the rhythms of nature.  This father is reliving the world in his own way.  That’s my idea.

B:  You work now mostly in acrylic, right?

N:  [nodding]  It usually takes a couple of days.  First I do the drawings, trial runs, and when I’m sure about what I need to do, I move on.  Every single painting takes a lot of thought. 

B:  Can you tell us what effect the technological revolution of computers has had on your work?

N:  My father was a typographer, so I’ve always lived around printing. Maybe it’s fate, but I always thought about making drawings that would be published. I was just a kid.  I went to school until I was fourteen, and then the fascist wars started, and the wars in Africa, and then all you heard about was the war, the Jews, and to some extent the manhunt for Jews. 
First it was unclear, faraway, then it became more urgent.  My father worked with an important Jewish editor, and he heard about these things and told me I had to quit school and come to work.  He knew what he was doing and put me to work making plates to print photos.  This appealed to me because I was already a painter, so they gave me the most important projects.  Remember, the experienced men had all gone off to war.  When the photographer left, they told me to take the photos.  Then make the plates, then the color selection.  All beautiful and interesting work. 
I also trained in reproduction, something that’s been completely forgotten because, with computers, this magic happens mechanically.  I learned color selection using very particular methods.  If there were four colors, you photographed the original four times with color filters.  With the orange filter, which contains red and yellow, you got blue.  Red and yellow absorbed each other and remained in the filter.  So with violet, which contains blue and red, you could get yellow, see?  This worked about 80% of the time if the photographer was very good at it. Whatever was missing, the chromist had to add.  On both positives and negatives, he would add or subtract the excess or the deficit of color.  We did all this on black and white photos, and you had to know if there was too much red or green.  You had to know what you were doing.  Now computers do all this.  I’ve always thought of the computer the way I think of a pencil or a pen.  I say to my students, “Kids, it’s too easy to go looking for what you need in a computer.  What you’re looking for is inside here [pointing to his forehead]!  Your fantasies shouldn’t be drawn by that expert inside the computer but by your own stupidity, the stupidity you carry inside your head.  That’s what gives variety in your figures, because that mark here, those deformations there, this is your art!”  This is the stupidest way to put it, but that’s how it is.

B:  So this new technology pushed you out of the film industry?

N:  No. It was television. Television came first to America and then to Italy, and people quit going to the movies. So, bit by bit, production and capital also withdrew.  I used to do on the average 150 or 200 films a year, two or so each week.  I was getting better all the time and thought I’d have a long life in cinema.  But the films stopped coming.  Then Italy got television, and Italian films met the same fate as the American ones. I spent most of my time in Rome, where I had a studio, and was thinking of moving there once and for all with my family.  But then one day I found myself saying to the director of MGM that I was quitting.  He said I couldn’t do that, I’d have to wait for him to leave first so my quitting wouldn’t happen on his watch.

B:  If I may, had you made good money working in the movies, had you saved enough to be okay at this point?

N:  I’d saved up and bought a house.  I’ve always produced a lot.

B:  Had you also been selling paintings?

N:  Yes.  Then I joined a publisher that made greeting cards, which were very popular at that time, and I directed that part—a large part—of the business for thirty-five years.  I’d spend one day a week at the plant in Montecatini, near Florence, organize everything, and bring home all the work I had to do that week.  So I was living peacefully at home and still being creative.  Now greeting cards are no longer painted by hand but by computers. 

B:  I’d like to ask another question.  What is the question you wish I’d asked you but didn’t?

N:  That’s a tough one.  Let me think.

B:  In other words, what would you like the world to know that perhaps you feel it doesn’t know already?

N:  Maybe I’d like to say this:  people who see me draw with ease and energy think that it’s easy to work this way.  Today it’s easy for me, but if they only knew how much I suffered before I learneds how to do it.  I studied the drawings of all the great artists to learn how each of them drew, say, an eye.  Form.  What marks gave energy to a drawing.  That this one was beautiful, that one, ugly, another seemed ugly but was actually beautiful—to understand all this.  I know life has given me a gift, but I think I also earned it.  I wasn’t born knowing how to draw.  Not at all.  My school friends drew very well, and I worked at it, I understood my mistakes, I knew my defects.  Maybe that was my great strength, to learn bit by bit from the masters.  Remember that I’ve been drawing for almost 70 years.  I began to understand it when I was just 14.  That’s when I began to see.
The message here is that you need to be highly critical of yourself, fiercely critical!  And then remember that you can always improve by going back, by taking out the “too much” you may have put into a drawing.

Now Campeggi is driving Christine and me over winding Tuscan roads back to our pensione in Florence.  We stop at a busy intersection.  A boys, maybe ten years old, stands in the middle of the street washing windshields while the light is red, hoping to make some money.  He starts to wash ours.

N:  [to the boy]  No, no, I said no, do you hear me? No!  [to me]  In America this isn’t permitted.  Our mayor permits this stuff.  I’m not a racist, but maybe just a little.  But I wouldn’t want to be racist, you have to understand.  But now, in the city, we’ve got people who don’t know what Florence is.  I’d like to see people come to Florence who, even if they’re poor or simple, love Florence for a reason.

B:  And what would that reason be?

N: Even in simple jobs, to be useful to Florence.

B:  What is this idea of Florence for you?  What is it that ought to be respected in Florence?

N:  Well just think that throughout the world there have been civilizations that little by little went extinct. The Greeks, for example. And where they became extinct, nothing was left.  Not even the memory of the civilization.  This happened even to Rome.  And then, from the Fourteenth Century on, this ray of culture that was the Renaissance was born right here in Florence, and it illuminated Europe and the entire world.  So out of respect for this you can’t let Florence go back to the nothing it once was.  We keep this message going as much as we can.  I don’t know if I’ve explained it well.

B:  Yes, very well.  But now, according to you, an African “extracommunitarian” [in popular Italian parlance, someone from a country outside the European Union; what’s usually meant is African or Arab immigrants or Eastern European refugees]. . .

N:  But they mustn’t come here like slaves.  I respect the world and all people.  People mustn’t be exploited just because there’s no one left to sweep the streets.  They hire extracommunitarians to sweep the streets.

B:  But even someone born in Florence could do that.

N:  Yes, but since Florentines have evolved, since there’s a little more wealth here and parents want their children to go to school until they’re old, what can I tell you?  The extinction of Florentine street sweepers will just happen, right?

B:  I’m an extracommunitarian, too.

N:  You’re an extracommunitarian who loves these beautiful things, who listens to me and has a good time.   Remember, I grew up in a fascist world where such things didn’t exist.

B:  So you still carry a little grain of fascism?

N:  I wish it weren’t so, but something has stuck with me.  I’m no fascist.  But that’s the milk I drank as a child, you see?

B:  And the idea would be a sense of order. . .

N:  Some more energetic order.  I have to tell you that in Florence they gave me the prize of the Golden Florin, an ancient Florentine ducat, and the mayor, who lives in Bagno a Ripoli, asked me if I’d accept it.  I accepted it willingly because I thought I’d earned it.  I don’t want to go unacknowledged in my time for my little work, even though I don’t feel much a part of that kind of social order, that prize system.  But I, too, would like to say what I have to say about this world, about what Florence is.

B:  I understand.

N:  This is Piazza Donatello, with the English Cemetery.  Elisabeth Barrett is buried here.  Over there you have Syracuse University.  Some of the buildings used to be artists’ studios, you see?

B: Yes.

N:  Don’t think that my racism is so terrible, about skin color or anything else. 

B:  I’m here to learn your opinion.

N:  My daughter-in-law is American and so she’s an extracommunitarian, too, and lives happily with us without being a slave.  But this discourse doesn’t influence anyone.  I’m sorry, but I wish the mayor wouldn’t open the door to extracommunitarians just to get extra votes.  That’s where I draw the line.

B:  Yes, I understand what you’re saying.  Now here we are, and I thank you so very much for the time you’ve given us.  Thanks so much for the conversation.

N: I thank you!  You came from America just to see me, right? [laughing]

The official 2007 poster of the Syracuse International Film Festival was designed by Maestro Silvano Campeggi and limited edition prints are available at The Point of Contact Gallery.

THE POINT OF CONTACT GALLERY
914 E Genesee St.
Syracuse, NY 13210

Tel 315 443 2169