An exhibition at Rome's fashionable Obelisco Gallery was stirring up some three-alarm excitement in Italian art circles last week. In a series of lurid, explicitly painted canvases, enterprising Artist Aldo Pagliacci, 38, had set fire to six of Rome's most famed and revered churches including St. Peter's itself.
To Catholic Rome that was a shocker. Critics goggled at Pagliacci's pyrotechnics; the newspapers, wary of violent reader reactions, carried no mention of the opening. But word-of-mouth publicity was enough to make the show a roaring success; within two days collectors had snapped up all 20 pictures on display, including the six church fires, collectively entitled "Roman Caprices."
Pagliacci, a thin, sardonic man, was tickled by the uproar but explained that he meant no harm; his ecclesiastical arson was based on purely artistic principles. "It all came from my desire to paint smoke in transparency against architecture. The idea of flames came later. Where there is smoke there must be fire Now the police are after me to find out if I have matches in my pocket. But I personally couldn't really set fire to St. Peter's."
Later, possibly to keep the fires burning briskly, Pagliacci slyly added that he had also been influenced by his recollection of one of the prophecies of the 16th Century mystic Nostradamus, forecasting a day of doom when "the horses of the Cossacks will drink from the holy water fonts of St. Peter's." To set the record straight, he explained that he has mild anarchist and atheist tendencies, but is strongly antiCommunist.
Precocious Pagliacci exhibited paintings in the Venice Biennale at 16. His career was interrupted in 1935, when he was called up for army service and sent off to Eritrea. During World War II he served as a magazine correspondent but was captured by the British in 1941.
While sweating out the weary months in a Rhodesian internment camp he was assigned to decorate the camp church's interior. He did the job in tempera, and claims that he completed a normal two years' work in four months, egged on by two Franciscan friars who kept him well fueled with cognac and whisky. (Pagliacci, a two-fisted drinker, says he does his best painting when slightly tiddly.)
Since his first postwar show in 1949, Pagliacci's work has climbed steadily on the bestseller lists. His paintings, marked by skilled draftsmanship and dramatic coloring, have had a particular vogue with U.S. collectors, among them Nelson Rockefeller and Cinemactor Clifton Webb. Last week Pagliacci, who knows a good thing when he sees it, was hard at work burning up two more Roman churches with pigment and canvas.