The figures on display at the Pilotta in Parma, curated by Camillo Langone

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If there's one thing that's undeniable, it's that Camillo Langone has become, in recent years, a prolific patron of paintings. Perhaps for lack of Princes, our beloved and often hated friend, the Feuillant, inventor of liturgical criticism, extoller of the Romantic method, an eclectic writer, Catholic, tabarrist, and anti-fascist, has commissioned more square meters of canvases than Pinot Gallizio's industrial painting produced. His most recent selection is now on display under the vaults of Parma's Pilotta Gallery for Bella Figura. Pittura italiana d'oggi (Bella figura. Pittura italiana d'oggi) , until November 30th, featuring freshly painted paintings, mostly commissioned, some in the process of being acquired for the Museum's permanent collections. Among these, certainly and rightly so, is Ester Grossi's portrait of Alexander Farnese, and hopefully at least one invention by Enrico Robusti, genius loci, who paints four overexcited women on the Asiago plateaus, their arms raised as in the opening sequence of Mulholland Drive. Then comes a portrait of an Italy all to be eaten, with chicken, salami, cheese, tripe, macaroni, mortadella, frogs, and even Caravaggio's fruit basket in a crate. Next to them, a Maria Luigia, mad about her von Neipperg, kisses him in curlers a stone's throw from Antelami, while Franco Maria Ricci's Jaguar E, repainted blood sausage red, awaits them below. A carnivorous and far from vegetarian painting, like Lorenzo Tonda's oil painting in which a pathetic environmentalist turns the plants he loves so much into fertilizer.

The most Caravaggesque painting is a Nicola Verlato, an enormous altarpiece dedicated to the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, stiff on the stretcher next to the Giulia GT that night in Ostia, among some details of the Burial of Saint Lucy and the Supper at Emmaus from the National Gallery, the deeply grieving Orson Welles, Ezra Pound, Maria Callas, Ninetto Davoli and other Pasolinian icons, in the dark field, on the back the number seven of a soccer goal, symbol of the dream shattered at dawn on November 2, 1975. One of the few works to have a wall all to itself, as Simone Vezzani's Beatrice and Marta, Chiara Calore's great Cupid and Psyche and the triptych of beautiful figures drawn in pencil by Omar Galliani that give the exhibition its title would deserve, but also the small frontal jewel by Fulvia Mendini, chiseled in detail, and Giovanni Gasparro's Saint Francis, surprised at the moment of the stigmata, thrown to the ground, his gaze suspended between terror and ecstasy. like an alter Christus already ready for the glory of heaven.

Camillo didn't hang it, but the large Guttuso painting from 1955, which opens and closes the exhibition in the atrium of the vaults, remains noteworthy. An excellent painter, at least in a dozen or so paintings, from Togliatti's Funeral to this great Beach that is a constant stampede. A joyful Guernica—good old Guttuso just couldn't shake his veneration for Pablo Picasso—he even places it among the bathers, buxom women, and flabby men while he—lying on the edge, only his feet visible from his self-portrait—paints the scene. At that time, Guttuso spent his summers in Velate and occasionally came to visit my father in Oleggio. More often, on Sundays, his butler, our father's brother, would arrive, always hungry. "The Maestro eats caviar and nothing arrives in the kitchen!" Socialist realism at its finest, to live well while speaking amiably of the revolution that no one wanted and of painting that was then going out of fashion but now, eighty years later and not only thanks to Camillo, has returned strong and vigorous among us.

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