MANOSCRIPTO – A Life of Matter, Marks and Disobedience

I am nobody.
And yet, for more than forty years, I have made a living from what I could create with my own hands.
Painting paid the rent, the bills, the good days and the difficult ones. Thousands of my works found homes in places I could often never have imagined.
Perhaps, in the end, that is what I am most proud of.

I was born in the Maremma, Tuscany, Italy, on an autumn morning in the late 1950s, along the Tyrrhenian coast at Punta Ala. I still carry that land within me.

It was different then. Wilder, quieter, perhaps poorer too. Much has changed since, and I do not always recognise myself in the glamour and conventions that have taken over places I remember very differently.

Before finding my way home again, however, life took me quite a long way around.
I learned to draw before I learned to read.
For many years my world was made entirely of graphite, lines and ink. Black and white. Then came oil colours, pure pigments and what I still consider a small form of alchemy: the transformation of matter into colour.
I did not learn it at art school. I learned it in a remote corner of Tuscany, beside my teacher and mentor, Maestro Wolfgang Widmoser.
Another fundamental figure in my life was the scientist Professor Gustav Max Obermair.
They were very different men, yet both taught me something that had little to do with either a paintbrush or a scientific formula.

They taught me to overcome some of my fears. And every now and then, to fly.
I grew up in Milan, worked as a designer in Paris, and knew Rome’s Via Margutta when it was still genuinely inhabited by artists. I painted in the street. I worked for antique dealers and art merchants.

I passed through studios, workshops, galleries and storerooms. I saw the world of Italian art from below, from above, and most importantly, from behind the curtain.
Some of my paintings travelled much farther than I ever did: into prestigious collections, into the Vatican, into the Dutch Royal Household, and into the homes of people who belonged to worlds I had once observed almost as an outsider.

Sometimes my paintings even found themselves hanging beside works by artists I had previously known only through books. It always gave me a strange feeling, because I remained exactly the same man.

I was also fortunate enough to meet people who genuinely had something to say. Bruno d’Arcevia in his studio while he worked. Leonardo De Magistris during the mornings in Via Margutta. Federico Fellini over breakfast at the bar. They were not encounters to collect like photographs.
We talked. About art, of course, but also about power, the market, freedom, conformity, and that subtle mechanism through which society decides who deserves to be heard and who does not.

Over the years I came to understand that mechanism rather well, and I liked it less and less. I saw genuine talent remain in the shadows while others, far more skilled at relationships than at their craft, built remarkable careers. I watched critics, dealers, financial interests and convenience turn art into something that, at times, had very little to do with art at all.
Sigfrido Bartolini called it “The Great Deception” (La Grande Impostura).
I saw part of that machine at work. Up close. I never really learned how to belong to it.
It probably cost me quite a lot. But I cannot bring myself to regret it.

Meanwhile, real life continued. My health forced me to stop for a while. Then came years devoted to books, whatever work I could still do, and above all to caring for my parents until the end of their lives. There are experiences from which you do not return unchanged.

Illness, too, reminded me rather brutally how little certain ambitions matter when you suddenly find yourself facing the essential things. Perhaps that is why today I look at that enormous circus with a certain distance. I never built a perfect career. I built a life.
I painted thousands of works and sold them in many parts of the world. I sweated, made mistakes, started again, laughed and sometimes cried.

But I lived from my art. As an independent Italian artist, that matters to me more than any label.

I do not know whether I will ever appear in the important art directories and, frankly, I no longer care very much.

I prefer to think that somewhere, on walls I will never see again, something I once painted with my own hands is still hanging.
When the noise of that world became too loud, I felt the need to go home. After many sacrifices — and no gifts — I finally managed to create my small refuge in the Maremma, on a hill overlooking the sea and the Maremma Regional Park. Not because this part of Tuscany has become fashionable or exclusive. Quite the opposite.

I came back because this land belongs to me in the only way a place truly can: when you still recognise yourself in the smell of its air. Here, time follows a different rhythm.
What was once a chicken coop has become my modest home and, at the same time, my perfectly untidy studio. Canvases, brushes, pigments, pieces of wood, books and objects gathered over the years live here with me without worrying too much about order.

Home and workshop have become one again, as they once were.
Outside there are trees, chickens, passing animals and all those small creatures that have apparently decided my rather unruly garden suits them perfectly well.
When the season allows it, I work outdoors. Rohan, my Collie, watches.

I paint. Something moves through the grass. The wind comes in from the sea.
I do not need much more.
My garden bears little resemblance to those immaculate green carpets surrounded by geometrically trimmed hedges and flawless swimming pools. Here, nature still has the right to be a little untidy. So do I. Perhaps this, too, is part of the Italian way of life I recognise as my own: not the glossy version sold in magazines, but something older, quieter and more closely tied to land, work, food and memory.

Every now and then, at sunset, I open this place to friends, curious visitors and people who simply share the same interests. I call it the “Giardino da Tè”. We sit and talk.
Books, society, art, nature, the occasional uncomfortable idea, and anything else that still deserves the luxury of a slow conversation. There is no admission fee.
Whoever wishes to come, comes. And often, by the end of the evening, something to eat appears as well.
I am told I am fairly good in the kitchen too. I cannot be the judge of that, but cooking for someone gives me a particular kind of pleasure. In the Italian culture I come from, offering food has never meant simply feeding someone. It means welcoming them.
Perhaps Manoscripto begins exactly here.
I did not want a blog. I did not want an online shop. Nor did I want yet another portfolio designed to convince somebody of my importance. I needed a quiet place.
An open notebook in which to gather what I have seen, learned, loved, disliked or simply observed over the years.
Art, animals, nature, books, memory, food, society. Fragments of Italian history, personal memory, rural life and stories from Italy as I have known it. Matter and thought.
You will not find an editorial line here. Probably not even a straight line.
I have nothing I desperately need to sell you, and no algorithm I intend to please.
If something interests you, stay awhile. If something irritates you, that is perfectly fine too.
And if you find a sentence worth keeping, copy it.
Perhaps one day, somewhere in the world, someone will read these pages and a small part of what I have seen will continue its journey.
That is my Manoscripto: not an open letter, not a message in a bottle.
Simply the logbook of a man who has spent much of his life among matter, images, animals, people, mistakes, stubbornness and colour. The door is open. Come in. There is no hurry...

Viviano Masconni