Giacometti

One
1901-1922
1
The Bregaglia Valley lies deep in a cleft of southeastern Switzerland. A meeting place between north and south, a place much traveled through since Roman days, it has nevertheless retained a character all its own. A telling evidence of this is the religion of Bregaglia's inhabitants, sternly Protestant amid surrounding Catholics. From the foot of the Maloja Pass the valley slopes steeply downward to the Italian frontier at Castasegna, a distance of twelve miles. It is a region of precipitous slopes, jagged peaks, icy streams, high meadows, and simple villages. Beautiful but austere. Before winter's snows first fall to the valley floor, the sun leaves it. From early November till mid-February, the sheer mountain walls cut off all sunlight, and the coldest time of day or night is high noon, when fiercest cold is driven down to the frost-encrusted depths.
"It's a sort of purgatory," Diego sometimes said.
However that may be, it was there that everything began for the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. It was there that circumstances led him to become an artist, there that they assumed their fullest meaning, there that the allegory of his life pointed its most profound and valuable moral.
Life in Bregaglia was hard in the years before electricity and automobiles. Amenities were few, pleasures rare. The local men frequently left home to seek their fortune in less trying climates. If they often went away, they usually came back sooner or later, either for good or for regular visits. Austere and rigorous as it may be, and perhaps for that very reason, there is something about the valley which attaches itself to men's hearts and so dwells in their mind's eye that other places seem insipid by comparison. Therefore, it was not unnatural, after a stay in Warsaw and another inBergamo, that a young fellow named Alberto Giacometti returned about 1860 to the small Bregaglia village of Stampa. And there, on the 15th of November 1863, he married a girl named Ottilia Santi.
The Giacometti family had by then been a long time in the valley, having come originally from somewhere in central Italy, where the name is a common one. Prosperity, however, had so far eluded the Giacomettis. The Santis, on the other hand, were people of substance. Ottilia brought with her in marriage the prospect of material as well as emotional security. Among other things, her family owned the inn at Stampa, named after a ten-thousand-foot peak which dominates the northern side of the valley: the Piz Duan. Ottilia's husband became the innkeeper.
Whatever may have been his ability in other respects, Giacometti was a potent husband. He fathered eight children, of whom seven were males. The third of these, a son, born on March 7, 1868, was named Giovanni. He grew up to be a gentle, pensive boy and early showed an interest in drawing. While at school, he came to feel that he would like to be an artist. The innkeeper encouraged his son in this ambition, helped him with money when possible, and sent him to study in Paris.
Giovanni Giacometti was a man of medium height, robust, with red hair and beard, and blue eyes. Gentle, sensitive, sincere, he liked other people and was liked by them. His work resembles him. Neither adventuresome nor innovative, yet it shows spirit and imagination. His paintings are still pleasing today because he looked with incorruptible pleasure at life, and they have a certain nobility because he had.
The start of his career was beset by difficulty and hardship. His father helped occasionally if he could, but there were days when Giovanni went hungry. Having finished his studies in Paris, he went to Italy and stayed some time in a town on the Bay of Naples not far from Pompeii. This was the most painful period of his life, and in later years he spoke of it often. But he returned periodically to Bregaglia. Early in 1900, he suffered a profoundly troubling bereavement. His father died. The innkeeper who had understood and sustained the artistic aspirations of his son did not live to see them fulfilled, and this must have been a further causeof distress to Giovanni. If so, it may not be coincidence that in the year of his father's death he made up his mind at the age of thirty-two to marry.
Annetta Stampa was not beautiful! She was handsome. The distinction already says something important about this forceful, extraordinary woman. She was about the same height as her husband, physically vigorous, with a prominent nose, dark eyes, and black, wiry hair. In her bearing there was something commanding, though at the same time outgoing and warm. Throughout her life, which proved to be an exceptionally long one, she made a powerful impression on others, and most of all on the members of her own family.
The Stampas were people of means. They owned houses and land. Thus, like his father, Giovanni Giacometti married a woman who was able to better his condition in life. An excellent cook, fastidious housekeeper, and vigilant holder of purse strings, she assured the family's well-being and comfort during the years before Giovanni's paintings began to sell. She was a woman of indomitable resolve and principle, went to church regularly, and held a stern view of propriety. Yet she was not provincial or narrow-minded. She read the newspapers and her house was well supplied with books. She loved talk, especially a good argument, and had a ready sense of humor. Knowing what she thought about most things, including art, she never hesitated to speak her mind.
Borgonovo, "the new village," lies along a gentle slope about a mile up the valley from Stampa. Annetta had been born there. Her parents lived there, and it was there in the Church of San Giorgio, where his father's funeral had taken place only eight months before, that Giovanni Giacometti was married to Annetta Stampa on the 4th of October 1900. And it was in Borgonovo that the newly married couple first settled. They rented an apartment on the second floor of a plain three-story house in the center of the village.
Giovanni may have been a mild-mannered, temperate, and unassuming man, but, like his father, he proved to be a potent husband. Three months after their wedding his wife became pregnant, and at one o'clock in the morning on the 10th of October 1901 theirfirst child, a son, was born. The happy parents named him Giovanni Alberto Giacometti. Because his father's name was also Giovanni, the child was never called anything but Alberto by his parents or by anyone else, and the name certainly suited him, for it means illustrious through nobility. In time, everyone, and even he, may have forgotten that Alberto's first name was Giovanni, but the fact--and its significance--remained.
The first few months of the infant's life were those during which the valley lies in the shadow. It was not long before an event occurred in the lives of the parents and their child which may have affected decisively his way of looking at the world, and also--because he happened to be a genius--our way of looking at it.
Copyright © 1983, 1985 by James Lord