Portrait (adriana Minetti), 1923

oil on cardboard

48 x 38 cm

signed lower right 'G. Costetti' and dated left '1923'.

Giovanni Costetti was born in Reggio Emilia in 1874. He showed skilful skills right from the start, but proved intolerant of the academic environment. He then made a trip to Turin where he visited the Galleria dell'Accademia Albertina and became interested in the painting of contemporary artists such as Antonio Fontanesi. He did his military service in the Savoy city and then moved to Berne, Switzerland, where he met Hodler who initiated him into the Symbolist language. 

In the capital city he found a very rich cultural climate that revolved around the 'In Arte Libertas' circle led by Nino Costa and Giulio Aristide Sartorio, a point of reference for Giovanni Costetti's painting. In fact, he studied late medieval and Renaissance artists, but also the works of Dante Gabriele Rossetti and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

In Florence, on the other hand, he met Ardengo Soffici, Giuseppe Graziosi, Umberto Brunelleschi and Armando Spadini, who usually met at the Caffè Gambrinus. Thanks to his friendship with these artists, he held his first solo exhibition in Florence in 1899, showing a series of drawings inspired by the Renaissance. 

In 1900, the artist left for Paris where he deepened his Symbolist component, completely disinterested in Impressionist research, remaining above all fascinated by the painting of Paul Cèzanne.

In 1902, he participated in the Alinari competition for the illustrations of a new edition of the Divine Comedy, but did not win. The following year he made his debut at the Venice Biennale. The works of this period were very much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite influence but also by Arnold Böcklin's symbolism, through a manner that he called 'Venetian', evoking the painting of Giorgione and Titian.

Between 1905 and 1906 he produced a series of 'grotesques' in which he depicted a marginalised society in an anti-bourgeois polemic following a Nordic style.

In the 1910s, declaring himself disillusioned with the artistic movements of those years, he closed himself up in isolation in Settignano, but approached a circle of personalities interested in mystical philosophies in Florence to which he was introduced by Arrigo Levasti. In 1910, he also made friends with Gustavo Sorni, a collector of Cézanne. From this point onwards, Symbolist and mystical stylistic elements increasingly merged with Cézanne's hard strokes and Fauves chromatism.