Giovanni Battista Ciolina


Giovanni Battista Ciolina was an Italian neo-impressionist and divisionist painter.

Biography

Born into a family of Valle Vigezzo farmers in 1870, he attended the Rossetti Valentini Art School in Santa Maria Maggiore - where he became close friends with other future painters such as Carlo Fornara, Gian Maria Rastellini and Lorenzo Peretti Junior - for five years, beginning in 1882, absorbing the teachings of Enrico Cavalli, a great connoisseur of the French art of the era and the historic innovator of painting in Valle Vigezzo.
In the late 1880s, he received a two-year scholarship to attend the Scuola libera del nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. A talented and precocious artist, he demonstrated the level of excellence he had achieved with the works Ritratto della madre and L'ombrellino rosso . In the company of his friend and fellow painter Carlo Fornara, he spent a long period in Lyon between 1895 and 1896 studying the great masters and learning about the new painting on the other side of the Alps. On his return to Italy he turned to Divisionism, applying the new technique according to the example of Giovanni Segantini. After his first showing, at the Third Triennale of Brera in 1897 with the painting Il filo spezzato , he opened a studio in Milan, where he produced numerous paintings in the divisionist style, including La lavandaia , Fanciulla che guarda dalla finestra and Mestizia crepuscolare . He took part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and, after gradually abandoning Divisionism, arrived at the Venice of 1907 with the painting Preludio di primavera , making extensive use of impasto and retaining the luminosity of his earliest works, but with the addition of a melancholy lyricism typical of Neo-impressionism, often entrusted to compositions of broad and powerful scope as in paintings Ritorno all’alpe and Toceno al tramonto .
At the outbreak of the Great War, Ciolina left Milan and retired to Valle Vigezzo, where he continued to paint landscapes, still lifes and religious frescoes until his death.

Exhibitions