Pellizza e un «innamorato dell’arte». Il momento divisionista di Antonio Ballero (1903-1907) / Pellizza and a «lover of art». The pointillist moment of Antonio Ballero (1903-1907) (197-223)

The work of the Sardinian painter Antonio Ballero (1864-1932) is an example of the power of Divisionism to penetrate even the most peripheral contexts, working as a free pass to modernity for Italian regional cultures that were striving to find an identity capable to help their integration into the unitary State. A painter and writer close to the circle of intellectuals gathered around the novelist Grazia Deledda and interested in the issue of the cultural and social rebirth of Sardinia, in 1904 Ballero, after a verist debut, arrived at Divisionism following the example of Pellizza da Volpedo. Through the analysis of the correspondence between the two artists, this paper reconstructs Ballero’s divisionist phase, identifying and dating his crucial works, and showing as in his paintings, centered on the theme of Sardinian landscape, the artist combined the modern technique of Divisionism with a subject whose “primitive” associations he emphasized in the process of identity building.