Giovanni Testori e la Montagna: Geografie visuali e forme artistiche

Giovanni Testori constructed a powerful and visceral mountain imagery, in which the mountain not only takes on a geographical dimension but also becomes a theatrical, sacred and symbolic reality. This article explores the role of the mountain, which, with its spatial dimensions, its environmental values and its landscape values, enters Testori’s wide-ranging and articulated literary and artistic production. The presence of the mountain with its silences, its colours and its vertical proportions underlines a strong
contrast with the city and with that vast and magmatic world of the urban
subordinate classes living in the undergrowth of Fordist-style industrial
Milan immortalised in Il dio di Roserio (1954), in the stories of Ponte della
Ghisolfa (1958), in l’Arialda (1960) and in Il fabbricone (1961). The mountain
shows all the expressive force of nature and thus becomes a dimension
that cyclically influences both Giovanni Testori’s painting and writing.