Benvenuti

Trained by Lorenzo Cecchi at the Scuola delle arti e dei mestieri in Livorno, Benvenuti began exhibiting very early, at barely fifteen years of age. Initially influenced by the Macchiaioli – particularly by his close friend, the landscape painter Adolfo Tommasi – he soon absorbed the contributions of Llewelyn Lloyd, Giovanni Fattori, and Telemaco Signorini. Gradually, however, the young artist turned to new avenues of experimentation, including Divisionism, and exhibited works such as Cavallo alla mangiatoia and Trittico di Suese (1901–1902), which attest to these explorations.

In the early 1900s, he met Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, who became both his mentor and friend. A painter and engraver with numerous connections in England and France, Grubicy, together with his brother Alberto, founded the Grubicy Gallery and worked tirelessly to promote Italian painters and Divisionism. Under his influence, Benvenuti fully embraced this technique and moved to Milan in 1905. Until 1920, he divided his time between his native city and Milan, where he met many artists, including Pellizza da Volpedo and Angelo Morbelli.

In 1907, he sent seven landscapes to the exhibition of Italian Divisionist painters organized by the Grubicy Gallery in Paris, which featured an important group of works by Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati and the sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti. Two years later, he exhibited in the Italian section of the Salon d’Automne alongside his friends Llewelyn Lloyd and Plinio Nomellini.

He took part in the Mostra di Arte Libera in Milan in 1911, and in 1914 in the 83rd Exhibition of the Società Amatori e Cultori in Rome. His encounter with the painter and art critic Charles Doudelet introduced him to Rosicrucian and Theosophical circles. Taken prisoner in Germany during the First World War, he returned to Livorno in 1921, where he frequented the Café Bardi, a gathering place for many artists and writers who would form the Labronico group, founded in 1920 in the studio of Gino Romiti. That same year, he exhibited at the Prima Biennale Romana with Ulvi Liegi and Nomellini. During the 1920s, he also worked as an illustrator and lithographer for newspapers and posters.

Amputated in 1932 due to illness, he was not mobilized during the Second World War and settled in Lucca with other members of the Labronico group (1945, Galleria Tallone, Milan; 1948, Casa Dante, Florence). In the 1940s, his landscapes took on a more spiritual and lyrical dimension. He ceased painting in the 1950s as his eyesight progressively failed.

Divisionism enabled this sensitive and lyrical artist to convey on canvas and paper a profound sense of nature and light. He painted rustic landscapes, rural houses, cypress trees rising toward the sky, flocks returning to the fold, bridges and buildings – very seldom human figures. Through small pencil strokes filling the sheet and breaking up space, or through long strokes of pure, juxtaposed colour in his paintings, he sought to express the vibration of light and sound, the intrinsic energy of nature, and the divine presence within all things.

The motif of a large sun radiating an energetic halo appears repeatedly in his work. Here, it is the sanctuary of La Verna – the mystical site where Saint Francis of Assisi is believed to have received the stigmata in 1224 – bathed in the sun’s immense radiance. The simplicity of the composition and the particularly harmonious interplay of colours lend this work both a striking dynamism, echoing the cosmic movement that animates the world, and a deep, inner serenity.