Divers in Painting
by Francesca Giacché 

In the history of figurative art dedicated to the underwater world, the oldest evidence is the well-known Assyrian bas-relief dating back to the 9th century BC, in the British Museum in London. C., in the British Museum in London, which shows underwater swimmers with leather wineskins full of air from which they breathe through a straw.
Over the millennia, there have been many testimonies in which reality and imagination have been fused and immortalised in images that have gone down in history: From the painting of the Greek Scyllis, the 'storm swimmer' who, together with his daughter Cyana, sank King Xerxes' Persian fleet by cutting the moorings, to the Roman 'urinatores', hired by Cleopatra to play a joke on Mark Antony, a keen fisherman, who are depicted in an Egyptian painting attaching a stockfish to the hook of his rod.
Also famous are the miniatures - such as the late medieval one or the 16th century Indian one - which depict Alexander the Great attaching a stockfish to his rod.
- These depict Alexander the Great diving with a sort of bell, in accordance with the well-known medieval legend which has survived in various versions.
With the Renaissance, underwater iconography, which until then had mainly been a simple artistic representation of a real or legendary event, became more 'technical', enriched with drawings, sketches and projects relating to the invention of new diving equipment, such as those by Leonardo da Vinci in the 'Atlantic Codex'. 1 Between the 18th and 19th centuries, there was still room for the imaginary, and the master of Japanese dream painting and of the "image of the floating world "2, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), gives us a "diver in a bottle", gazing in amazement at the bottom of the sea.

Bild01: The 'diver in a bottle' by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) 

Considering the vastness of underwater iconography, for this report I have chosen to limit my research to "divers in painting" 3, taking my cue from the painting on the cover and the series of paintings recently donated by Folco Quilici to our association (see article page 17).
As is often the case when starting a new research project, I realised almost immediately that, even if I limited the field to paintings dedicated to divers, the subject would not be exhausted in such a short space of time, so this article does not claim to provide a complete picture of the subject, but rather to mark the start of new investigations.
Browsing through images and texts, I discovered that the figure of the diver, at first essentially linked to technical drawing or realistic reproduction, has taken on symbolic meanings since Futurism, discovering new artistic values and offering different interpretations.
A significant example is Carlo Govoni's visual poem, Il palombaro (The Diver), which has already been discussed in our magazine (see HDS NOTIZIE n. 45, December 2009), a rare example in Italian poetry of the combination of drawings and words.
 Remaining within the Futurist sphere, I would also like to mention Enrico Prampolini's sketch entitled "Palombari notturni" (Night Divers).
 There is another painter who worked during the two world wars and was close to the Futurists, being part of the battalion of the Volontari Ciclisti Lombardi (Lombard Volunteer Cyclists)4. He was Anselmo Bucci (Fossombrone 1887 - Monza 1955), whose painting was also influenced by other artistic currents, starting with Impressionism.
 He was a soldier-painter and, towards the end of the Great War, the Regia Marina turned to this activity and, imitating what the Allied Commands were doing at the time, decided to use the work of artists for their propaganda.
At the end of the Second World War, Bucci, who in the meantime had continued his artistic activity, divided between painting and etching, again offered his work to the Regia Marina, which welcomed him by sending him to various Italian ports to capture moments of life at sea with his painting.

Bild02: Anselmo Bucci, Palombaro (1941) 

In 1941 he was in La Spezia and some of his works dedicated to submarines and divers date from this period: Submarine in Dock, Submarines Departing, Siluranti at the Mooring, Diver's Spears, some of which are part of the Banca Intesa - Sanpaolo Art Collection.

Bild03: Anselmo Bucci, Lance da palombaro (1941) 

The period of the two world wars was certainly the most intense in the history of diving. Our divers were in demand on board ships, in ports and military bases, always ready to leave for wherever they were needed at sea, but also in the inland waters of rivers or lakes.
This was the case of the La Spezia diver Arturo Pardi, who in 1917 volunteered his technical skills to direct the clearing and subsequent reconstruction of the bridge at San Donà del Piave, thus allowing the passage of troops.
This feat earned him the title of Cavaliere della Corona d'Italia (Knight of the Italian Crown) and acquired even greater prestige and resonance because it was carried out in the middle of the war, with four long months of work under enemy bombardment.
It was on this occasion that his colleagues from the "Cozzani & Pardi" salvage company in La Spezia donated him a tempera by the painter Luigi Agretti (1877-1937) which shows him, dressed as a diver in a classical-style setting, about to take the Knight's Cross from the hands of a young man, under the gaze of a woman, probably a symbol of the Fatherland, wearing an armoured bust with the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Italy, protected by an angel in flight.
On the opposite side, behind the logo of the salvage company with helmet and anchor, a palm branch, symbol of glory and justice, in the background the bridge over the Piave.
Luigi Agretti was, like his father Cesare, his first teacher, a well-known painter and decorator. At the age of only 15, he carried out his first work in Monte Castello di Vibio (Perugia): the decoration of the Teatro della Concordia, which still exists today and boasts the record of being the smallest theatre in the world.
In 1895, after winning a scholarship, he went to Rome and, while attending the Academy of Fine Arts and the Artistic Museum of the capital, he assisted his talented masters Bruschi and Brugnoli in important works.
In 1900, at the age of 23, the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia unanimously nominated him Academician of Merit and offered him the chair for teaching nude painting and pictorial anatomy. He refused the chair so as not to leave his city, La Spezia, where he settled permanently, dedicating himself above all to fresco painting.
All his works, both oil and fresco, reveal a meticulous study of details, extreme accuracy in drawing and great originality.
He treated both sacred and profane subjects, history and mythology, always with great artistry and profound knowledge.
Many of his frescoes decorate churches, sanctuaries and private villas in various Italian cities, and in La Spezia he decorated, among other things, the ticket office of the central station.
A contemporary of Bucci and Agretti was the Triestine painter Carlo Sbisà (1889-1964). After working as a chiseller, goldsmith and machine designer, he won a scholarship to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
After two years, in 1921, he abandoned his studies but continued to live in Florence and to devote himself to art.
He then lived and worked in Milan before returning to his native city in 1923, where he devoted himself to the fresco technique, decorating both public and private buildings.
From the post-war period onwards, he worked mainly in sculpture, a passion that accompanied him for the rest of his life.
We remember him here for his oil on canvas painting 'The Diver' (1931), which is kept in the 'Pasquale Revoltella' Civic Museum in Trieste and was pointed out to us by Pietro Spirito.

Bild04: 1920 Tempera by Luigi Agretti depicting the diver Arturo Pardi. 
Bild05: Carlo Sbisà, The Diver, 1931, oil on canvas.

A few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American painter Dunn Thomas Harvey (1884-1952) painted a diver working with a blowtorch on a sunken wreck in Pearl Harbour, 'The Flame That Cuts Through Sea and Steel', oil on canvas dated 1945.
The painting was made for an advertisement for the Air Reductin Company, Inc. and later appeared as an illustration in an article dedicated to Harry L. Ingram, Jr. inventor of the first underwater blowtorch.

Bild07: Dunn, Harvey Thomas, Deep Sea Diver at Pearl Harbor, 1945, Oil on canvas.
Bild06 Cesare d'Antonio, The Mountain Diver, 2006, Acrylic painting.

Contemporary art has continued to devote its attention to the figure of the diver, and surfing the Internet has yielded many discoveries and surprises.
Like when I found Cesare d'Antonio's "Palombaro di montagna" (Mountain diver): I immediately remembered Mario Garzia, the oldest diver in Italy (101 years old!), who still remembers, to this day, the figure of the diver. ), who still remembers, always with a certain amused smugness, that he did his military service in the Alpine corps and that he was appreciated and respected because his companions had discovered that even in the mountains a diver could be useful: after all the objects harnessed and hoisted from the bottom of the sea, he was the best at tying knots, and the knots of the Alpine soldiers, like those of sailors, had to be secure.
As the painter wrote to me when I told him the story of Mario Garzia: "...this is proof that reality far exceeds fantasy...the Alpine diver!!!" "this diver cuts the pipe that bound him to the safety and tranquillity of the seabed to face the adversities of the earth.
Despite the difficulties, he succeeds in his intent: to reach the highest peak to have a different point of view from his nature...."
"Cesare d'Antonio is a set designer, painter, sculptor and illustrator. He has a studio in Rome and in San Benedetto del Tronto, his home town.
In his works, the Catanian painter Francesco Balsamo reinterprets reality starting from real images, old photographs or prints that he magically transfigures following his suggestions and imagination, a sort of 'magic realism' that I find fascinating and at times disturbing, like the transposition of nature into interiors: insects, amphibians, birds, flowers, often oversized, that populate sumptuous interiors and stately homes.
Fascinated by Balsamo's work, I also found the divers, naturally revised and reinterpreted, but decidedly intriguing, as Flavia Matitti writes: "[...] Balsamo rarely produced outdoor scenes.
However, the Palombaro (2006) is significant, a further emblem of absence, as a figure emptied of meaning.
He is in fact a wooden figure and is found on the shore of a lake, nailed to a table, without a head and holding a useless diving suit, the result of combining two pot lids.
The Diver is, in short, a domestic version of the mannequin, somewhere between melancholic and amused, and it is worth remembering here, albeit in passing, another important aspect of the artist's poetics, hitherto unmentioned, that of irony, which manifests itself through a good-natured and curious look at the world.
Balsamo's divers look like old, decapitated suits of armour, such as 'The Diver-Gardener', without a helmet and without a head, but with a watering can by his feet; finally, the 'Diver's Chair', but don't expect to see the old 'stool' used for dressing, but rather an elegant chair with a high back abandoned on the bank of a river.

Bild08: Francesco Balsamo, The Diver, 2006, ink and pencil on paper.
Bild: Francesco Balsamo, The Diver Gardener, 2006, ink and pencil on paper.
Bild: Francesco Balsamo, The Diver's Chair, 2008, ink and pencil on paper.

From Sicily to Brittany and back to the traditional diver, Michel Hermelin, who lives and paints in Rohan, between landscapes, portraits and reproductions of famous paintings, the divers, who have always fascinated him, emerge again. In addition to this oil painting, Hermelin has also faithfully reproduced old postcards with images of divers.

Bild: Michel Hermelin, Plongeur, oil on canvas.
Bild: James Barnett, Diver, acrylic on panel 

Continuing to browse, I came across the diver by James Barnett, a painter who usually paints landscapes and portraits from video games, Bill Westerman's oil painting and Nicole Eisenman's, Art in Ohio and currently an artist and musician for sale on a website; among the paintings of professional in New Jersey, it marks the passage divers in commerce, unusual and amusing between 'diver in painting' and 'diver in the series of divers with musical instrument, comic and in grafi c', a subject to which I hope also made on commission by A. Hahn (The mad craft shoppe). Finally, the watercolour by John Brite, a graduate of the Cooper School of Art in Ohio and currently a professional artist and musician in New Jersey, marks the transition between 'diver in painting' and 'diver in comics and graphics', a subject to which I hope to devote a further article in one of the next issues of our magazine.

Bild: Nicole Eisenman, Deep Sea Diver, 2007, oil on canvas 
Bild: Bill Westerman, Deep Sea Diver, oil on canvas 
Bild: A. Shay Hahn (The mad craft shoppe), series of musician divers 
Bild: Agostino Giacché, Diver at Work, 1982, oil on canvas
Bild: Agostino Giacché, Diver at Work, 1982, oil on canvas.
Bild: Agostino Giacché, Giaeta. Portrait of his father, 1980, oil on canvas.
Bild: John Brite, Deep Sea Diver, watercolour 

To conclude this long overview of diver painting, I cannot leave out the 'family' paintings by my father Agostino Giacché, a 'sea painter'. His favourite subjects are sailing ships and transatlantic liners, but he is also a good portrait painter and, among the portraits, there are some dedicated to his father Virgilio (Giaeta), a diver.
Even today, when the 'ancient profession' is almost disappearing, there are still many artists who choose the diver as the subject for their paintings, whether for realistic representations or symbolic interpretations, it does not matter: the diver today is perhaps less in the background, but still 'on the crest of the wave'.
1) A rich excursus on the subject is offered to us by the precious column "Underwater-historical iconography", edited by Federico de Strobel, which accompanies the covers of our magazine, to which the first issue of HDSI will be dedicated.
2) Ukiyo-e, literally "the image of the floating world", is a Japanese artistic printing technique on wooden blocks.
3) Divers in classic diving suits: helmet and rubber suit.
4) The battalion of the Volontari Ciclisti Lombardi (Lombard Volunteer Cyclists) brought together several donated tempera by the painter Luigi Agretti, exponents of the Futurist movement including Marinetti, Boccioni, Sant'Elia and Carlo Erba.
5) Between 1906 and 1915 he lived in Paris, frequenting the major artists of the time, including Severini, Modigliani, Picasso, Utrillo and Apollinaire, and experimenting with graphic techniques.