IVREA. Taken from the essay by Giovanni Testori G. Martino Spanzotti. The frescoes of Ivrea, published by the Olivetti Cultural Center in 1958 and dedicated to the Church of San Bernardino. «Ivrea must have been the great opportunity for Martino. Let alone the emotion of the members of a family like hers, which has almost always been dedicated to works of art; and above all let alone the emotion of the father: the son had made it ».
“That’s where he works for now. But you also know how my Martino works … he says that more than drawing, you have to color and that before coloring you have to look, look at everything with care, with love, even the things that no one has ever noticed, perhaps for the simple reason that fall before our eyes every moment … and then, it seems funny that a master to whom they have entrusted a work like that, the whole story of Christ on a wall, just think, well, it seems to laugh that instead stop and talk to the people who pass through the streets and take to the fields, and who never stop looking at it, studying it, as if looking there, among those poor devils, who will be able to make the Madonna and who the Saint Joseph , who angels and who the Baptist! Many times then, towards evening, I see that he picks up and alone, with his eyes full of melancholy, he goes into the fields. We would have to believe him crazy, if he were not so balanced, so wise, so human! And let’s not talk about the beasts! He looks at them, touches them, runs his hands over their backs countless times as if he wanted to preserve their shape as well as their warmth. When we are at the table, more than once I, my wife and his brothers surprise him intent on taking a glass full of wine, moving it now here, now there, and finally pointing it in the direction of a ray of sunshine that window falls down on the tablecloth; then once he has arranged it in this way he is able to go on for the rest of the dinner to observe the reflections now pink, now purple that the wine makes on the white of the canvas and the shadows that, on the side of the glass, make the two or three loaves that are there, as if it were the vision of a dream. It is that for him the dream is everyday things … ».
“That old Pietro was not mistaken in boasting of that continuous observation of his son, he could have convinced himself shortly after, when he went up to Ivrea to give him the full support of his heart, he found himself in front of the scene of the Annunciation:
– Martino, but that’s our kitchen! The same window, the same shutters, the same shadows … and what appears outside is the lime tree from our garden … to the left is the fireplace, and to the right, here, to the right you go to my room. .. “.
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