Pietro Annigoni: Florence Flooded

"Drawing of a Man"
by Pietro Annigoni 

"On 5th November, 1966, just after I had begun a portrait, I learned from the New York papers that Florence was flooded. A photograph in the 'New York Times' showed the Piazza San Marco three feet under water, but down in the Santa Croce area, where I had my studio until 1953, the water was five times as deep and still rising. The following day I had a telegram assuring me that my family and friends were safe, and only as the days passed and more and more news came through did I realise the true extent of the calamity. I noted in my diary: 'The disaster is really of gigantic proportions. Poor people and poor Florence. In the last twenty-five years it has endured the war, with the bombing, shelling and mines; then the rebuilding and expansion, with the hideous impositions of of a vulgar, anti-Florentine building industry; and now - a flood which must be the most disastrous in its long history. The toll of the death bell?'

I accepted the face that a great many of my own works must have been destroyed, but I had reckoned without the foresight of a stalwart friend, Palmiro Meacci, who is now my indispensable secretary and manager of my business affairs. For many years before the flood, he, together with Riccardo Noferi, used to do a little art dealing and he kept a small stock of my drawings and paintings in the backroom of a bar, of which he is part-owner, near my studio. The floodwater reached the ceiling of the bar but not before Palmiro had saved the paintings in the back room. 

He also remembered, before it was quite too late to save one of my biggest works from a warehouse where it was stored. This work, called 'Life, measures 3.5 by 5.5 metres and is painted in oil tempera on Japanese paper laid down on canvas, but although it was submerged in the water the paint remained fast, and it was possible to lift the paper and re-lay it on a new background canvas. The restored picture is now in the Pinacoteca Accademia d'Arte at Montecatini, Pistoia.

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)