Studio: international art (78.1919)

A YOUNG ITALIAN ENGRAVER: BENVENUTO DISERTORI

“ARCO DELLA MANDOLA, PERUGIA”
ETCHING BY B. M. DISERTORI

but in Tuscany and in Rome, the Eternal
City, where for the last three years or more
he has been working with renewed energy.

It is obvious that work evolved from such
an intense spiritual struggle, and purified
and reinvigorated by slow filtering through
several years of meditation, must of neces-
sity present a very different aspect to that
produced by certain superficial impres-
sionists who are proud of the ease and
rapidity with which they wield the graver,
and by certain engravers (to be still more
despised) who do not disdain to have
recourse to photography to complete their
work. 0 0 0 0 0 0

It is evident, on the other hand, that
these twenty-five impressions which Peru-
gia, Gubbio, San Gemignano, Fiesole,
Florence, and Rome have suggested to the
artist, and in which perhaps the untrained
28

eye will only admire the gracefully com-
posed picture, have been prepared with
unusually patient detail and thought. Each
element has been carefully observed and
the value of its effect upon the whole com-
position calculated ; a very judicious selec-
tion has ruled in the choice of one site
against any other ; everything has been
considered—the light at a given hour, the
limpid atmosphere of a certain season most
propitious to accentuate the special char-
acter of an arch, a piazza, an intersection
of streets or a group of houses, and to a
point of view which, for Disertori as for
the French artist Meryon, is preferably
panoramic and from a height downwards.

To Disertori, steeped in readings from
the works of the Italian writers of the thir-
teenth century, the massive, rugged walls
of old palaces, towers, and campanili which