L'opera letteraria di Giulio Aristide Sartorio tra memorialistica e autobiografismo

[Machine translation] Giulio Aristide Sartorio is especially known as a painter and illustrator, as well as for his friendship with Gabriele D'Annunzio. Less known is his literary production, which includes a few episodic poetic texts, a fantastic-satirical novel (Romae Carrus Navalis. Contemporary fable, 1905) and some dramatic texts (Tre novelle a Perdita, 1917; Sibilla. Dramatic poem, 1922). Almost completely unknown are then two writings that fall within the genre of memorialism: the series of memories published in 1907 on the “Twentieth Century” under the title The Confessions and the Battles of an Artist, and The Fable by Sansonetto Santapupa, a sort of fictionalized autobiography written by the painter during his imprisonment in Mauthausen (1915-17) and then published in episodes in the “National Review” (1926-29). This contribution examines these two writings, relating them to private documents, especially letters, but also literary works published in volumes, rich in autobiographical elements: think of the pre-Raphaelite Rome represented in Romae Carrus Navalis, and the alter ego of Sartorio played by the protagonist Alessandro Brandi, the family memoirs behind the 'novel at a loss' entitled The Masquerade of Fido and inspired by the life of his great-grandfather Siro, involved in the anti-Napoleonic movements of 1813, or the suffering Personal story of divorce from his first wife at the center of another hopeless novel, The Harpoon.