The masterpiece Light, movement, color, conceived by the artist Giulio Candussio, shines, immense and iridescent, in the courtyard of the Mosaic School of Spilimbergo (Pordenone). Those thousands of tiles that create a whirlwind of light celebrate the Friulian institution’s 100th anniversary. In fact, on January 22, 1922, the first 38 boys started mosaic courses at the Bevilacqua barracks. The war had just ended, the misery was great and it was decided to give a future to many young people, otherwise destined for emigration, and often of low level.
Because the school was born in Spilimbergo
Thus, where rivers of stones grow, the light of the mosaic blossomed. Spilimbergo, the Pordenone foothills of sunny magredi, is rich in stones lying as it is between the Tagliamento river and the Cosa, Cellina and Meduna streams. Stones everywhere and waters that gurgle but offer no way to create wealth. Therefore, the Friulians from here found wealth in what they were rich in: the stones, the claps. They are not eaten, they do not make roses bloom but mosaics and luminous floors and the school inherits a double mosaic tradition, the one that comes from Aquileia, of Roman origin, and the one that shines in Venice, of Byzantine style. Without forgetting that in the nineteenth century, many terrace artists, starting from Spilimbergo and Sequals, created sumptuous works around the world, from the mosaics of the Paris Opera (Gian Domenico Facchina) to those of the Library of Congress in Washington.
An international institution
From 1922 to today, thousands and thousands of young people from all continents (today there are about twenty countries represented) who have passed to Spilimbergo for the three-year course, to which one is added for further training. Hours and hours bent over the stump with the hammer in hand, days studying art and computer graphics, drawing, experimenting with how a terrace is made or how an architecture is decorated. All very practical, in contact with the material, starting with the stones of the Tagliamento that are collected in the river bed and become carpets of colors. From Spilimbergo they arrive there Iridescent lightning bolt installed in the Ground Zero subway in New York and the mosaics of the Foro Italico in Rome or those of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Tradition & modernity
In recent years, the School, led by president Stefano Lovison and director Gian Piero Brovedani, has made a great leap towards expressive modernity, innovating the mosaic language but maintaining the values of tradition. The headquarters today is a precious treasure, an exceptional museum, which can always be visited, where ancient and ultra-modern interact and from where the celebrations for the hundred years of history began on Saturday 22 January. Study seminars, exhibitions, guided tours are scheduled throughout 2022 (info: scuolamosaicistifriuli.it) to celebrate, as the Friulian poet Novella Cantarutti wrote, the mosaic which “is stone or glass within which color has congealed”.
