Critics & Reflections

Marco Bussagli is one of Italy’s most respected art historians, with over 200 publications to his name. A professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, he is an expert in art history, anatomy for artists, and iconography, and has authored acclaimed volumes on Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. His scholarship bridges rigorous academic tradition with accessible, insightful interpretation. His voice brings both historical context and scholarly legitimacy to Capone’s practice, positioning it within a lineage of classical mastery and contemporary reinvention. 

Pietro Capone’s painting is precious. In fact, these are works on the verge of virtuosity—carefully crafted and polished, yet not overdone, because there is a thought behind them and a sensitivity built up over the years by an intelligent and cultured artist, even though very young. Pietro did not immediately turn to painting. His path, already oriented toward art, began with other experiences. After high school, he first studied Archaeology and then music. A full-time passion which, however, between one note and another, prompted him to create canvases and pick up brushes. For this reason, attending courses at the Academy of Fine Arts was inevitable. This gave him the opportunity to engage with the techniques of the masters of the past.

But it was not a dry, theoretical study (although theory is inevitable in painting, as in all sciences worthy of the name), rather a lived experience, aimed at recreating ancient gestures and recovering the memory of the great masters. From Charles Le Brun to Ingres, from Cabanel to Boldini, these are the models Pietro looked to, but without copying: rather, inventing. Therefore, figures alone no longer suffice, and now, alongside the splendid bodies—almost always female—there coexist freshly written letters that serve as a backdrop to the pose and, at the same time, add depth to the story of the sole protagonists, revealing all their sensual beauty.

The handwriting is elegant, almost nineteenth-century, sometimes written with black ink—specifically ferrogallic ink, used by medieval scriptoria scribes; other times skillfully mimicked with a brush and oil paint (another demonstration of skill), but always employed to achieve the same effect: amplifying the image’s suggestiveness. These are not fake texts. Some are original compositions by the artist, reflecting passion and torment, as in the case of “Remorse,” where a young woman in a pure satin dress turns back against the background of a letter, which among other things reads:
“I caught you in the thrill of the current that overturns words and leaves them on the softness of your lips, which, like shells, hold the terror and instinct within me that created the desert of a distant God.”

In other cases, they are quotations from important works, as in a canvas like “The soul is hindered by what happens in the body,” where a naked woman is crouched inside a glass dome, while another outside seems to pour black ink onto the transparent ‘cage’ that traps her. Almost as a comment on the scene, as a background, there is a long quote from the Hermetic Corpus of Hermes Trismegistus, which serves as a warning to foolish, distracted, and insipid humanity, as demonstrated by this passage:
“Where are you running, O men, drunk after drinking the doctrine of ignorance like pure wine, which you cannot even endure, and which you are already about to vomit? Stop, and return to yourselves. Lift the eyes of your heart upward, and if not all of you are capable, at least those who can. The evil of ignorance floods the whole earth, corrupts the soul imprisoned in the body, and does not allow it to cast anchor in the port of salvation.”

Finally, sometimes, the words borrowed by the artist are those of the great Sappho, as in the case of the refined charcoal on blue paper depicting the poetess Sappho (The Death of Sappho), while in the background are these verses:
“I truly wish I were dead. / Leaving me crying loudly, / she said to me: ‘When we are given to suffer, / O Sappho: against my will / I must abandon you.’ / Sappho responds: ‘Go away happily, / but remember I was always loving you.’”

These fragments of souls are thus collected by Pietro as notes or, as he calls them, Σημειώσεις, meaning “signs” of life and memory.

—Marco Bussagli

Vittorio Maria de Bonis is a respected Italian art critic and curator known for his writing on contemporary art, art theory, and the philosophical dimensions of visual language. His critiques often explore the interplay of image, text, and identity, making his perspective especially attuned to Pietro Capone’s work. His statement below offers a poetic and intellectual reading of Capone’s technique, influences, and unique relationship between the written word and the painted body. 

Defended by its almost virginal whiteness, which seems to resist any attempt to force it and to give voice to the Inexpressible— as Stéphane Mallarmé states in his famous 1893 poem Brindisi, composed for a writers' congress of which he was elected president— the blank page that the poet faces, which he associates with the sail of a ship ready to guide his young companions of verse and dreams of art toward the unknown, reappears as an evocative, exemplary image in Pietro Capone’s painting.

And not only— and perhaps simply— due to the evident decadent suggestions of his poetic writing, which provides the graphic backdrop to the evocative epiphanies of the nude bodies of his proud models, but also because of his passionate search for an expressive verb that, with exemplary lightness, unites Bouguereau and Caravaggio, David and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Velázquez and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hayez and Burne-Jones in an alchemy of references and suggestions. This evocation simultaneously conceals and reveals debts and influences, all in the name of a classical Beauty that aspires to modernity.

The great school of French and Italian academic Nude aligns with the sorrowful yet innovative wisdom of Caravaggism, generating—a sort of short circuit—a suspended physical dimension, not devoid of cinematic suggestiveness, which renews from within what could otherwise be a clever and calligraphic operation of quotation, refined but lacking genuine impact.

The flesh associated with poetry, the color that hides and, by contrast, exalts the writing, come together with unexpected virtuosity in an embrace that lends itself both to being a brilliant backdrop for the image and to commenting or illustrating it. Those bodies and fragments of bodies materialize with absolute and fascinating insistence precisely because they are evoked and generated by poetic utterance.

Writing finds its form, and form distills and sublimates into verse: the highest and most vertiginous aspiration of every authentic creator of ideal Beauty.

—Vittorio Maria de Bonis