31 Facts About Giovanni Testori

Giovanni Testori was an Italian writer, journalist, poet, art and literary critic, dramatist, screenplay writer, theatrical director and painter.

Giovanni Testori was born in Novate Milanese, a town on the outskirts of Milan, the third of six siblings.

In 1943, during his second year of studies at the Politecnico, Giovanni Testori was compelled to evacuate with his family for several months to the big house at Sormano, in Valassina.

In 1942, Giovanni Testori made his first appearance as a playwright, with two single-act pieces, La morte and Un quadro.

Giovanni Testori published articles which openly took a firm position in the debate between realism and abstraction which was animating the Italian artistic scene, under the strong influence of Picasso.

In 1947, Giovanni Testori obtained a degree in letters at the Universita Cattolica di Milano.

On this occasion, Giovanni Testori met Roberto Longhi, the great art historian he had long admired for his critical commitment and for the quality of his prose.

Already in this public debut, the experimental nature and the pictorial matrix of Giovanni Testori's language, imbued with dialectic inflections, were evident.

In 1955, Giovanni Testori curated the important Mostra del Manierismo piemontese e lombardo del Seicento, mounted in Palazzo Madama, Turin, and in Ivrea, with the support of the Centro Culturale Olivetti di Ivrea and of Vittorio Viale, Director of the Musei Civici of Turin.

Giovanni Testori curated the first monographic exhibition dedicated to this latter, mounted in the Musei Civici of Turin and at Varallo Sesia the following year.

Giovanni Testori related dramas and heroes from the outskirts of the city with an attitude of great humanity and understanding that was to bring him international success.

Still in 1958, Giovanni Testori published a book on the frescoes in the Church of San Bernardino in Ivrea, in the heart of the Olivetti industrial settlement.

Giovanni Testori had met the Frenchman Alain Pierre Toubas at the end of the 1950s.

Giovanni Testori was the love of his life, his companion and, in some ways, his son.

Giovanni Testori is a key character to an understanding of Testori's involvement with the theatre, the evolution of his relationship with Luchino Visconti and the birth of the gallery named Compagnia del Disegno.

Much of the author's erotic and sentimental imagery is linked to Toubas, whose lineaments Giovanni Testori poetically saw in many of the paintings he most loved, such as Tanzio da Varallo's David.

Giovanni Testori was working at this time on Erodiade, a play initially conceived for Valentina Cortese and repeatedly announced by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano but never programmed there.

Giovanni Testori remained constantly committed to his work as art critic.

Giovanni Testori continued to promote, through a series of exhibitions in private galleries, the work of modern and contemporary figurative artists from Gianfranco Ferroni to Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Cristoff Voll, Antonio Garcia Lopez, Pierre Combet Descombes, Abraham Mintchine, Max Beckmann, Helmut Kolle, Willy Varlin, Federica Galli, Francis Gruber, Jose Jardiel, Paolo Vallorz and many others.

Giovanni Testori himself interpreted it, with a first performance at the Pier Lombardo on 1 November 1978, followed by a tour extending to more than a hundred Italian centres.

Giovanni Testori published more than eight hundred articles over the following sixteen years.

In 1986, Giovanni Testori provided an intense essay on the possible sources and figurative references of I promessi sposi for the catalogue of Manzoni.

Giovanni Testori wrote the information sheets for several of the paintings exhibited.

Two conversations held by Giovanni Testori are fundamental to an understanding of his thoughts on I promessi sposi and the role assumed by the novel in those years in Italian cultural debate.

Giovanni Testori published several articles on international artists such as Francis Bacon in specialized magazines, including Flash Art and FMR, and continued his activity as a militant critic, committed to drawing the work of young painters and sculptors to the attention of the public and critics.

Giovanni Testori had high praise for Abraham Mintchine artwork and was puzzled by the naivete of modern art history narratives which were able to miss on such extraordinary talent.

Giovanni Testori returned to the theme of Francesco Cairo, assisting in the curatorship of an exhibition of this painter at Villa Mirabello, Varese.

Giovanni Testori's health worsened in 1990 and he was taken into the Ospedale San Raffaele of Milan.

Giovanni Testori continued to write there frenetically, dedicating himself to several projects at the same time.

Giovanni Testori concluded a Verse translation of St Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians, issued in 1991 by Longanesi, his last publisher, and continued to work on theatre pieces, starting on a second Branciatrilogia.

In 1992, Giovanni Testori was able to see the publication of Gli angeli dello sterminio, his last novel, set in an apocalyptic Milan, almost a prophecy of the whirlwind which was forcing the city, at the time of the book's publication, into the throes of the corruption scandal known as Tangentopoli.