ERCOLE PIGNATELLI: A BAROQUE LIFE
Curated by Antonella Mazza and Claudia Ponzi
Opening: 10 March 2026 | 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM
On view until 24 March 2026.
ERCOLE PIGNATELLI: A BAROQUE LIFE
A life lived passionately, without restraint, worthy of the plot of a novel or of a neorealist film by a great Italian director.
Ercole began painting at the age of seven, while he was in third grade.
As a young boy, he decided that he wanted to become a painter.
His eyes were filled with sun, beauty, passion, and torment.
To fulfil his dream, he knew he had to leave.
He arrived in Milan from Lecce by train on the morning of 20 November 1953.
He was 18 years old and had 7,000 lire in his pocket. He bought Corriere della Sera to look for a place to sleep, randomly pointed his pen at an advert, and called a phone number using a token.
He found a room for rent at Via Formentini 5, in Brera.
His destiny as an artist had already prepared an extraordinary welcome for him: his novel-like life, somewhere between La Bohème and Miracle in Milan, had already begun.
He leaves the house and, in the fog of Via Fiori Chiari, notices a great deal of movement: he is in the district of the brothels.
He bumps into the doorway of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Someone calls out to him: it is the painter Ettore Sordini, who invites him into Bar Jamaica, where he meets Salvatore Quasimodo, Lucio Fontana, and Milena Milani.
That very day, his life changes.
Milena Milani introduces him to her partner, Carlo Cardazzo, owner of Galleria del Naviglio in Milan and Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, who becomes his art dealer.
As soon as he arrived in Milan, he saw the banner announcing Pablo Picasso’s exhibition: Guernica was on display in the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale.
He was struck by that anti-Franco cry of pain, exhibited in a hall still marked by fires and bombings.
He would make a daily pilgrimage to contemplate Guernica until the end of the exhibition.
“That exhibition was unforgettable for me,” he recalls.
In that same place, in 2024, he paid tribute to Picasso by reinterpreting Guernica itself through Memento Amare Semper, a painting performance in which, over the course of 12 days, he created a universal denunciation of wars and fascism, into which he introduced a courageous pink dawn of hope.
Milan immediately notices his roaring, irrepressible, and passionate energy.
In those years, the art world was relatively small, and the lives of young artists unfolded among the streets of Brera.
With great naturalness, he soon came to know everyone, winning them over with his extraordinary imagination and his free, playful spirit.
Ercole Pignatelli entered the Milanese artistic scene with a deeply personal mark, as well as the hearts of many artists and intellectuals of that time.
His surprising flashes of brilliance, his jokes, his self-irony, his vivid intelligence, his natural intuition, his uninhibited talent, and his great heart led him to form true friendships with figures who are now found in art history books and school textbooks.
The 1950s and 1960s in Brera were unrepeatable years: a concentration of personalities that would be astonishing even today.
Salvatore Quasimodo, Giorgio Kaisserlian, Piero Manzoni, Dino Buzzati, Roberto Crippa, Raffaele Carrieri, Migneco, Wifredo Lam, Franz Kline, Virgilio Guidi, and Lucio Fontana were dear friends of his. Ugo Mulas took his first photographic portraits.
Speaking of Dino Buzzati, he recalls: “We used to go to dinner three times a week with his wife Almerina, Cardazzo, and Raffaele Carrieri at Don Lisander in Via Manzoni. Later, Lucio Fontana, Massimo Campigli, Carlo Carrà, Crippa, Dova, Peverelli, Cassinari, and Morlotti would join us. Unforgettable evenings!”
On 12 December 1953, only 22 days after his arrival, Ercole Pignatelli had already painted Carlo Cardazzo’s portrait and was regularly visiting Lucio Fontana’s studio with Piero Manzoni.
“I was very close friends with Piero Manzoni, with whom I often helped Fontana prepare the grounds for his canvases.”
During one of his exhibitions in Venice, he met Raffaele Carrieri, who dedicated the first article to him in Epoca: Ercole Pignatelli, the Swallow Boy.
In 1954, he won the San Fedele Prize for young artists, which was presented to him by Carlo Carrà.
In 1971, Montale asked him to illustrate his Cinquante ans de poésie for Gallimard and Mondadori.
Master Ercole Pignatelli has never forgotten the colours of his childhood in Lecce, nor the Baroque. He has been nourished by the Baroque since earliest childhood.
His work possesses all the defining characteristics of the Baroque: dynamism, swirling movement, and curved lines; dramatic intensity, with strong contrasts of light and shadow; theatricality, emotional involvement, and spectacle; decorative richness, exuberant ornamentation, and splendour.
He paints Salento atmospheres, dreamlike visions, and almost oriental landscapes with farmhouses and palm trees on the horizon. His natural gesture gives rise to shoots, vines, vineyards, grapes, and flowers, the result of an alchemy of energy, poetry, passion, colour, and matter, transformed into an almost primordial force.
It is a rich, overflowing visual narrative, full of life, nourished by his Mediterranean sensibility.
Unpredictable and free-spirited, he allows us to glimpse the treasure chest of memories of his dear friends in the art world.
These photographic portraits, dating from the 1950s onward, were transformed by him through retouching with inks and colours. They reveal how at ease he was in every circumstance of life, confident in his talent, deeply imaginative, and entirely unconventional.
They testify to his spontaneity, his joy of living, and his constant playful sense of fun.
Dear Ercole, you are a master of life and a source of inspiration for your three beloved artist children: Daniele, a film director; Luca, a painter; and Francesco, a photographer, as well as for your extraordinary grandchildren.
And also for me, as I have always observed you with such curiosity and affection.
Thank you, Ercole, eternal swallow boy.
Antonella Mazza
BIO
Ercole Pignatelli (Lecce, 1935) is one of the great masters of Italian art.
He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1978 with From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature, and again in 2011 in the Italian Pavilion.
“I remember with nostalgia my most important gallerists, starting with Carlo and Renato Cardazzo, then Giorgio Marconi, followed by Dino Tega, Marco Conte, and later Antonio Sapone from Nice, who, together with André Verdet, organised exhibitions for me in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Antibes, and finally, in 1997, in Japan with Picasso and the Russian Avant-Gardes.”
In 2000, the anthological exhibition Sfinge e fato, curated by Pierre Restany, André Verdet, and Marina Pizzarelli, was held in Lecce.
In 2011, he painted Germinazioni, a monumental wall work created with water-based synthetic enamels at entrance N3 of Palazzo Lombardia.
In 2015, at the Triennale di Milano, he created the performance Le fatiche di Ercole, painting a 120-square-metre canvas over 24 days, inside an extroverted ring with the audience within it: the theoretical and philosophical summa of a lifetime’s work, a heroic gesture that encapsulates the poetics of his art.
In 2017, Azimut, in Corso Venezia, Milan, organised an anthological exhibition dedicated to him entitled Mecenatismo Finanziario.
In 2020, Mondadori published his autobiography. Ercole Pignatelli. Metamorphosis , Curated by Fortunato D’Amico. The Catalogue of Modern Art, n’ 57, Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori dedicated the cover of the 2021 Catalogue of Modern Art to him.
In 2024, in the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale in Milan, he paid tribute to Picasso with the performance Memento Amare Semper, reinterpreting Guernica on a canvas of the same dimensions: 3.5 × 7.8 metres.
In 2025, at Studio Zecchillo, formerly Piero Manzoni’s studio in Brera, he exhibited a selection of works created between the 1950s and 1960s, dedicated to his friend Manzoni, with whom he shared studio and work during that period.
Also in 2025, the solo exhibition was held at MA-EC Gallery in Palazzo Durini. Matter/Metamorphosis. Dialogue curated by Fortunato D’Amico and Yinghao Kou.
At the Museo della Permanente in Via Turati, between 2025 and 2026, the anthological exhibition Imprinting, curated by Giancarlo Lacchin, retraces his entire Dionysian career as a painter.
Works in Museums and Private Collections
Alexandria, USA, Tran Potomac Canal Center; Hamburg, Germany, Wolfgang Heinricy Collection; Bergamo, Italy, Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Accademia Carrara; Buenos Aires, Argentina, Centro Cultural Recoleta; Cleveland, USA, Museum of Contemporary Art; Detroit, USA, Detroit Institute of Art; Fukuyama, Japan, Fukuyama Art Museum; Nice, France, Galerie Sapone; Madrid, Spain, La Caja de Pensiones; Milan, Italy, Castello Sforzesco; Otaru, Japan, Petersburg Museum, Picasso and the Russian Avant-Gardes; Tokyo, Japan, Sezon Museum of Modern Art; Tokyo, Japan, Kamakura Art Museum; New York, USA, Egon Von Fürstenberg; Mexico City, Mexico, Carlo Rodriguez; Campos Eliseos, Mexico, Eduardo Kennedy; Detroit, USA, Museum of Contemporary Art MOCAD; Lisbon, Portugal, Museu de Água, Mãe d’Água das Amoreiras; Lisbon, Portugal, Fundação das Casas de Fronteira e Alorna; Savona, Italy, Pinacoteca Civica Palazzo Gavotti, Fondazione Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Milena Milani in memory of Carlo Cardazzo; Palm Beach, USA, Irving Galleries Collection; Bellona (CE), Italy, Antonio and Aika Sapone Humanistic Centre for International Encounters; Mannheim, Germany, Gallerie Fahlbusch Collection; Portofino, Italy, International Outdoor Sculpture Museum; Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, Municipal Museum; San Francisco, USA, Italian Cultural Institute and The Italo-American Museum; Prato, Italy, Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art; New York, USA, Condon Riley Gallery; Philadelphia, USA, Robert Morris University; Salzburg, Austria, State Academy; Barcelona, Spain, 5th Joan Miró International Drawing Prize; Taipei, Taiwan, Gallery of Modern Art; New York, USA, The Luella Henkel Foundation; Washington, USA, Capricorno Gallery Arte Contemporanea; Palm Beach, USA, Timothy Eaton Fine Art Inc.
We also recall the donation of 54 works that Ercole and Gabriella Pignatelli made to the Municipality of Lecce, housed at the Castle of Charles V.
