A Mysterious Landscape: Pettorano sul Gizio

My predecessors at Escher in The Palace have often written about Escher’s Belvedere (1958), a favourite with our visitors. The print has a magical power that touches millions of Escher fans around the world. What appears at first to be simply a fantastical building turns out to be an impossible structure. How can it be that the ladder starts at the inside and ends at the outside of the building? And why are the pillars at the front and back connected? The figures wandering around the structure add to its mysterious character. Interestingly, Escher drew inspiration for these characters from Jheronimus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), part of which he had copied more than twenty years earlier. With the Italian mountain landscape in the background, this lithograph is a surprising mix of completely different elements.

It is not only the foreground of the print that has been a mystery. For many years, the landscape in the background was too. Research has shown that Escher did not invent the background of Belvedere, however. The landscape really does exist, in Italy. Escher lived in this country for more than a decade, and such vistas are common in his early prints. Aspects of Italy also recur in his later work. Think, for example, of the prominent role played by the village of Atrani in his three-part Metamorphoses series (1937, 1939-1940, 1967-1968) and the terraced Italian landscape that forms the backdrop to Waterfall (1961). Like Atrani, it is possible to pinpoint the precise location of the background in Belvedere: the village of Pettorano sul Gizio in the Abruzzo region, which Escher visited a number of times, including on an extensive tour in May and June 1929. The trip prompted a desire to produce an illustrated book about the region, so while there he made countless drawings of villages like Scanno and Pettorano sul Gizio. Later that year, he would develop many of them into prints. The book never came to be, but with 6 prints and 28 drawings, the trip certainly bore fruit. *

Escher visited Pettorano sul Gizio during this trip to Abruzzo with his close friend Giuseppe Haas-Triverio, with whom he made several tours of Italy and Corsica. Their visit to Pettorano sul Gizio was only brief. The two friends travelled there from Pescocostanzo, via Rivisondoli and Rocca Pia, on Wednesday 5 June 1929, and on 6 June they left for the larger town of Sulmano. Haas-Triverio’s journal shows that their stay in Pettorano sul Gizio was nothing to write home about. They arrived in the village at seven in the evening, to find that all the hotels were fully booked. They eventually managed to rent a private room, which was so dirty that Haas-Triverio describes it in detail in his journal. At night, an army of insects kept him awake and, hoping for a more peaceful night’s rest, Escher used large amounts of insecticide. After a very disturbed night, the friends set out in order to go sketching.

“We left our rucksacks at a small, clean restaurant and went in search of subjects. In the end, we did not feel like working, but felt we must. An oil sketch. We ate at the trattoria, and then made another small sketch.” **

While Haas-Triverio produced an oil sketch that has since been lost, Escher made a drawing of Pettorano sul Gizio and the valley beyond. The drawing focuses on the square houses of the Italian village in the foreground, but he also leaves plenty of room for the depth of the Gizio valley and the high mountain ridges. This preliminary study helped Escher produce a more detailed scratch drawing in October of the same year. The scratch drawing is in Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s collection, and the study is in a private collection in the US.

Escher was producing woodcuts with greater and greater ease in 1929, so the scratch drawings were a way of seeking more technical challenges. His scratch drawings were made after visits to various inhospitable regions of Italy. Besides Pettorano sul Gizio, he also drew Opi, Cerro al Volturno and Alfedena in Abruzzo, and Santa Severina in Calabria. The scratch drawings were made on thick, impenetrable parchment and can be recognised thanks to the gentle transitions from dark black to a golden beige colour, which makes them almost appear to glow in the dark.

This technique, devised by Escher himself, was described by his father George Arnold Escher in his journal:

‘We looked at the sketches Mauk made on his trip to Abruzzo, and developed one of them at Steckborn using a new procedure he has devised, namely applying a layer of printer’s ink over thick paper (parchment-like) that is impenetrable to oil and, by scratching away more or less of it using a small pocket knife, revealing tints of various shades. It is suitable mainly for darker drawings, like the interiors of churches and other buildings, taking less effort to depict light than dark.’***

During his visit to his parents, Escher’s close childhood friend Bas Kist came by. Having seen the scratch drawings, Kist advised Escher to make lithographs, and he followed the advice. This important decision to embrace lithography was therefore directly influenced by the scratch drawings. Escher had not made lithographs since his student days, so he turned to his former teacher H.B. Dieperink for some technical tips. Lithography then became a permanent element in his arsenal of printmaking techniques. The scratch drawings did not, however. This may be because of Escher’s love of printmaking, and his preference for the reproducibility of a lithograph or woodcut, rather than the uniqueness of a drawing. Nevertheless, they do warrant our attention, as the scratch drawings reflect his love of the Italian landscape and the abiding influence it would have on his work. ****

Despite the fact that Escher stopped making scratch drawings at a certain point, they proved popular at an exhibition held at Kunsthandel Martinus Liernur, a gallery in The Hague, in 1931. The exhibition presented a cross-section of Escher’s work since graduation, featuring Biblical scenes and the Emblemata series, as well as scratch drawings and prints of Italy. Art critic Jos de Gruyter wrote a lengthy review in Het Vaderland newspaper, which also discussed Pettorano sul Gizio in some detail:

‘The lithographs and related scratch drawings, as he calls them, emphatically testify to a greater sensitivity. I would rank his lithographs no. 39, Stilo, colla Fiumara, no. 44 Cloister near Rocca, Imperiale and no. 47, La Cattolica di Stilo in Calabria, among the most flawless and perfect that Escher has produced to date. The curious Pettorano sul Gizio (no. 50, above the fireplace) is however more fascinating and remarkable. The atmosphere of the landscape, which resembles a moonscape, is haunting. One is forced to wonder what kind of creatures might live in those regular, square, cubic structures in the foreground. Surely not people, for there is no trace of life, domesticity or warm blood. They must be stiff and unapproachable, the creatures that withdrew to these almost mathematically constructed square edifices to live an abstract and ascetic life. The drawing deserves much praise; the background, in particular, with the valley, mountains and sky, is beautifully, purely and tightly rendered.’ *****

The scratch drawings must therefore have been more than merely an experiment to Escher, otherwise he would not have shown them at Martinus Liernur’s gallery. They had a lasting impact on his work, not only because they led him to embrace lithography, but because elements of them inspired later prints. The simurgh (the mythical Persian creature with the power of speech) from the late scratch drawing Still Life (1943), for example, also appears in the prints Other World (1947) and Gallery (1946), and the valley and mountains near Pettorano sul Gizio provide the backdrop to Belvedere (1958). This is typical of Escher, who would occasionally decide to revisit subjects from decades before. In the case of Belvedere this occurred no less than 29 years later. Italy had an impact on Escher that would never fade.

Source
* M.C. Escher, His Life and Complete Graphic Work, edited by J.L. Locher, Abradale Press, 1982, p. 34
** Gemeinsam unterwegs. Giuseppe Haas-Triverio und M.C. Escher, Beat Stutzer, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024, pp. 144-146 (translated into Dutch by Marijnke de Jong and Beat Stutzer)
*** M.C. Escher, His Life and Complete Graphic Work, edited by J.L. Locher, Abradale Press, 1982, p. 34; Levensschets G.A. Escher, National Archive of The Netherlands, inv. no. 2.21.371, 97 (6 July 1929)
**** Maurits C. Escher, een eigenzinnig talent, J.W. Vermeulen, Kok Lira, 1995, pp. 44-45
***** Houtsneden, litho’s en teekeningen door M.C. Escher. Bij Martinus Liernur, W. Jos de Gruyter, Het Vaderland. 8 October 1931