Filippo De Pisis
Luigi Filippo Tibertelli de Pisis, simply known as Filippo de Pisis, was born in Ferrara in 1896. He enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bologna and made his debut as a poet by publishing the Canti della Croara in 1916: in the same year he met Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio and Carlo Carrà, soldiers in Ferrara, through whom he adheres to the demands of metaphysical painting. He has devoted himself assiduously to painting since 1923.
In Rome he becomes a friend of Armando Spadini and collaborates with
the magazines Valori Plastici and La Ronda. In 1926 he moved to Paris and remained there until the outbreak of World War II: in the paintings of these years he reworked the impressionist lesson in favor of a personal narrative lyricism, animated by a vein of melancholy poetry. After a short stay in London, he returns to Italy and works in Milan and Venice. In the same year he held a solo show, presented by Carrà, at the Lidel room in Milan. In 1943 he settled in Venice where his painting of him was influenced by the Venetian masters of the eighteenth century. It is in Venice for the 25th Biennale, the first after the war, that he dedicates a personal room with about thirty works to him.
In 1948, the first symptoms of the disease appear which will lead to his death. His last paintings are the mirror of his suffering: rarefied matter or dark colors express a profound mal de vivre. He died in Brugherio in 1956.
