Flavio Bertelli 1865-1941

Born into a cultivated family in San Lazzaro di Savena, near Bologna, Flavio Bertelli received his earliest artistic training from his father, the painter Luigi Bertelli. After studying in Florence in the studio of Telemaco Signorini, one of the leading figures of the Macchiaioli, whose teaching profoundly shaped his artistic sensibility, he entered the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts at the age of eighteen, where he received several distinctions.

Regarded as a promising painter, Bertelli made his debut at Bologna’s National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1888. In 1891, he participated in the first Brera Triennale, where he met Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, the leading theorist of Italian Divisionism—a decisive encounter in his artistic development.

That same year, the bankruptcy of the family business left him in difficult financial circumstances, although this hardship coincided with the emergence of his mature artistic identity. Working in a modest studio in the Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bertelli became involved in Bologna’s intellectual circles and participated in the activities of the short-lived Accademia della Lira.

From 1895 onwards, he exhibited regularly at the salons of the Società Francesco Francia, recently founded by Raffaele Faccioli. His landscapes, which reveal a subtle assimilation of Divisionist techniques (fig. 1), achieved a measure of success at the National Exhibition in Turin in 1898.

Alongside his work as an illustrator, Bertelli received several commissions for large-scale decorative projects, notably the baptistery of the church of San Ansano in Pieve del Pino in 1905. In 1909, he was appointed a member of the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts.

Deeply affected by the war, he suffered a severe depressive crisis in 1918, which gradually led him to abandon the formal rigour of Divisionism in favour of a freer approach, reconnecting with the teachings of Signorini and the Macchiaioli.

Invited to participate in the First Rome Biennale and the Fiorentina Primaverile in 1921, he travelled throughout Romagna and the Marche in the following years, painting landscapes distinguished by their remarkable delicacy of light. After settling in Cagnona di Bellaria in 1933, Bertelli continued to paint until the end of his life, developing an increasingly refined style in which matter appears to dissolve into light without losing any of its poetic intensity.