The re-emergence of the herbarium collected by the Ferrara painter as a young man. The artistic sensibility of many leading cultural figures was culti...

(Pascoli, Sbarbaro  and  Dickinson)  and painters (Klee, among others). Filippo De Pisis’s (1896 – 1956) cultural odyssey also began this way, as he published a short essay called Fiori e frutti nella pittura ferrarese del Rinascimento [Flowers and fruits in Ferrara renaissance pictures, ndt] in 1917 when he was twenty, displaying considerable botanical knowledge. The young man had sharpened his skills with an early interest that led him to collect and classify over one thousand specimens of dried grasses and herbs This collection was donated to the botanical garden of Padua in 1916-1917, and kept in the current herbarium (a university institute), but dispersed among 500,000 plant exhibits. The entire De Pisis collection has now re-emerged after three years of work. His works often cite the herbarium with pride. But the “complete” collection that he had organised as a young author had been dispersed by the master of the botanical garden who had made the controversial decision to do so in 1940 (including the specimens collected by De Pisis from the Veneto, Emilia and Romagna hills). De Pisis’s first specimen dates from 1907 (when he was eleven), while the last sheets of paper date from 1917. There is a dried plant specimen attached to each sheet in the collection, with an elegant label containing a taxonomic description and on-the-spot observations. Expressions of youthful enthusiasm and stylised drawings of leaves and flowers complete the accurately recorded information and don’t give in to the author’s tendency to “narrate stories”. The areas where he collected his specimens are evocative to Ferrara ears: the Technical Institute courtyard; the flat area on the wall of the public wash-house; the street that leads to the slaughterhouse on the right near the wall; a column in Piazza Ariostea, between the cracks; the well in the cloister of San Giorgio, and other provincial areas with a preference for Pomposa and sandy coastal areas. His enthusiasm for botany also spilled over into other fields: there was a short period in which he made collages and miniature decorations of flowers and leaves at the same time as he was gathering his collection of grasses and herbs. Collections of grasses and herbs, uprooting, and cataloguing are absorbing operations but enveloped in melancholy. The specimens are uprooted live, then dried and attached. They are still turgid and long-lasting, but they are lifeless. Their shape is the only thing that has been immortalised. The soul of the flowers flies away wrote a gloomy De Pisis and I consider the mystery that rules over life and beauty with a slight pang. We can wonder why an adolescent would take up the rigorous and time-consuming collection of grasses and herbs with such enthusiasm. De Pisis was not much more than a child when he left the first traces of himself: diaries with “impressions from real-life”, poetry, prose, drawings, and his first, uncertain paintings. He liked comparing himself to Leopardi because of the volume and variety of things that interested him. He spent entire days writing to the masters and suffering over Pascoli’s poetry. He was solitary and contemplative; he wasn’t a normal boy according to De Chirico who met him and was friendly with him between 1916 and 1917. Curiosity is normal in adolescents, but De Pisis was omnivorous, nothing was insignificant to him. However, the reality tends to be concealed, leaving a mysterious taste in the mouth: a mystery that De Chirico had already expressed in his disconcerting epiphanies (Barilli, 2007). Paintings from De Chirico’s metaphysical period were hung on the walls of De Pisis’s Ferrara rooms: a theatre of nature and a subversive theatre of art together under his watchful gaze. The inert objects that were to clutter up his future studios afterwards were a real-life transposition of his narration (they already existed transformed by his nice hands). And they spoke of aesthetic and physical desire, burning, almost blinding. De Pisis wrote: “the appearance of things, their mysteriousness, just won’t leave me alone” an impression that is also mixed in with his enthusiasm for botany, leaving traces in his phytomorphism. So at this stage we can’t avoid asking the question. If we consult the catalogues of his paintings, if we visit his extraordinary Malabotta collection that was generously donated to thecity of Ferrara and now exhibited at Palazzo Massari, what can we expect from a knowledgeable collector of herbs and flowers? Perfectly reproduced botanical specimens? On occasion of the exhibition put on in Ferrara in 1951 to honour an already seriously sick De Pisis, and referring to the painter Delacroix, the critic Cavicchioli wrote: «Nature is a dictionary… but nobody ever considered the dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the word». The potted flowers in De Pisis’s paintings are not copies of real life. Any yet his paintings do contain beloved, well-observed objects, they don’t make that leap towards abstraction. He wasn’t a simple flower painter; he wasn’t a painter that was easy to understand: truth and imagination do not blend well together in such an inextricable mix Arcangeli wrote of him. We know for certain that his art existed, or more precisely resisted, and that the entire output of an artist (including a herbarium) goes to form the overall picture. Since he couldn’t fully free himself from the shapes and forms, it was possibly a good idea to juxtapose the painting Mazzo di fiori [Bunch of flowers] (1932), belonging to Roberto Longhi and recently shown at a Piedmont exhibition, with a bunch of Erythronium Dens-Canis flowers, which appears on a herbarium sheet in the form of a small bouquet which he had attached with touching aesthetic grace in 1915.