Historical characters
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Historical figures born in Conegliano: Gianbattista Cima, Maddalena Montalban, Francesco Beccaruzzi, Arnaldo Benvenuti, Antonio Carpenè, Ugo Cerletti,...
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Gianbattista Cima

The fame of Conegliano is also linked to the name of the painter Giambattista Cima, who was born in 1459/60. He is an exponent of that magical period of Italian Renaissance pictorial art. Even today it is difficult to accurately reconstruct the life of the artist, whose date of birth is uncertain.

The most reliable hypothesis on the formation of the Cima is that of an initial apprenticeship carried out in Conegliano (which in the years of the youth of Cima was a period of great artistic fervor), before his move to Venice. But it is reasonable to suppose that, after having learned the technique of the painting, his talent pushed him, probably in the years 1487-1488, to the lagoon city, whose pictorial school was very much affected by the influence of nearby Padua and Antonello’s work from Messina. In this environment artists such as Giovanni Bellini, Vivarini and Vittore Carpaccio were formed. The Venetian school is mainly characterized by an interest in color and light, a clear reference to the paintings of Piero della Francesca and Antonello. The art of Cima is affected by this influence, in particular by the works of Bellini, his great master. Soon the Cima opened his own shop in Venice, making use of the experience gained.

Even the conclusion of the painter’s life is surrounded by uncertainty: he seems to have died in 1517-1518 in Venice or perhaps in the native city, where he would have moved to spend the summer months.

The paintings, with a sacred subject, are immersed in a landscape setting that sometimes almost becomes the protagonist of the representation. The landscape is born from the memory of the artist, who often brings together recognizable naturalistic and architectural elements, creating an image between dreams and reality in close symbiosis with the characters. In some works the environment is composed of mountains, villages, castles, churches and walls of an imaginative nature. In other cases the landscape elements are clearly identifiable. In at least 24 paintings, areas of the Conegliano area can be recognized in the background: sometimes it is the castle of Conegliano with the ancient church of San Leonardo or those of San Salvatore, in Susegana, and Collalto; the natural environment is often inspired by the rolling hills of Conegliano or the Piave valley. In some cases these references appear freely combined in the same work. The landscape of Cima thus becomes a realistic vision and documentary testimony of the structure of the city of Conegliano between the 15th and 16th century.

The art of Giambattista Cima was expressed mainly in the creation of works with a religious subject, in which he occupied a leading position in the artistic panorama of the Venice of the time. For ecclesiastical commission he executed large altarpieces and polyptychs, while privately he created a rich production of small paintings, always of sacred and devotional subject. These are generally depictions that repeat the same compositional scheme: Madonna and Child portrayed half-length, accompanied or not by a couple of saints. The fame and the notoriety of the Cima are linked to these sweet and at the same time solemn and majestic figures of Madonna.

No painting of the Cima apprenticeship period (until 1487) is known today while, between the works of the youth period (1487 / 88-1500), many are found in the United States or in Europe. Remember: the Sant’Elena (National Gallery of Art in Washington) rich in architectural details, among which the towers of Coderta and Castelvecchio are recognizable; the Madonna and Child (National Gallery of London) which depicts the hills and castles of Conegliano and Susegana. Among the works preserved in Italy, one can include: the Polyptychs of Olera (Bergamo) and of Miglionico (Matera); the Sacred Conversation of the Civic Museum of Vicenza and that of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan; the paintings (today in Venice) of St. John the Baptist between St. Peter, St. Mark, St. Jerome and St. Paul, the Baptism of Jesus and the masterpiece of the Madonna of Orange, with the background of the castle of S. Salvatore in Susegana; finally the Sacred Conversation of the Duomo (the artist’s only painting in his native city) and the Polyptych that belongs to the period of maturity (1500-1513), of the parish church of San Fior. The Madonna and Child between St. Michael the Archangel and St. Andrew also dates back to these years, at the National Gallery of Parma.

One of the buildings that embellish what was once the lower Wrinkle or Saran (now Via GB). Cima) is the birthplace of the painter. Identified by two scholars of the painter, Botteon and Aliprandi, through the discovery of documents from 1516 and 1578, was abandoned for years. It is due to the patronage of Camillo Vazzoler if the house was not only restored to the ancient structures, but allowed the recovery of an important piece of the city’s history. During the restoration in the foundations, an interesting stratigraphy with ceramic fragments of the recent Bronze Age (XIV-XIII century BC) resurfaced, a finding that opened the way to new hypotheses on the origin of the city; also on the walls dates have been discovered including a “1492 adì 9 otubrio”, referring to three days before the discovery of America. Currently the house, in addition to hosting the reproductions of the painter’s paintings and a small archaeological museum (with jars, keel cups and dolii found during the restoration), is home to the Cima Foundation, which promotes conferences and studies on the artist.

Ugo Cerletti

Ugo Cerletti (Conegliano, 26 September 1877 – Rome, 25 July 1963) was an Italian neurologist and psychiatrist. Creator of electroconvulsive therapy, commonly known as electroshock, used for the treatment of certain mental disorders.

Since 1935, metrazole (a seizure drug) and insulin were widely used in many countries for treatment of schizophrenia, with interesting results. From 1936 Cerletti began to look for a more economical method to perform the shock on his patients because the indigent conditions among which he was forced to work persuaded him of the need to find a less expensive means to provoke the “healthy” epileptic seizure. He came to use the therapeutic electroshock on humans after the experiments he conducted on animals about the neurological consequences of repeated epileptic seizures. The idea of using the TEC on neuropsychiatric patients came to him after observing some pigs that were anesthetized with an electric discharge before being taken to the slaughterhouse. The idea behind the approach was based on research carried out by Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg on the use of malaria-induced convulsions for the treatment of certain nervous and mental disorders – such as paralytic dementia caused by syphilis – as well as on theories developed by Ladislas Meduna, according to which schizophrenia and epilepsy were antagonistic disorders; research and theories that in 1933 led Manfred Sakel to develop the “insulin coma therapy” in psychiatry. In Genoa, and later in Rome, he used electroconvulsive apparatus to cause repeatable and controllable seizures on dogs and other animals. In 1937 in Münsingen, Switzerland, during a conference on new treatments for schizophrenia, the professor sought consensus and collaboration on the use of electricity as a convulsing medium but his intervention was completely silent. Also in 1937 a conference was held in Italy on the new treatments for schizophrenia where the professor exposed the data obtained from the first researches. In his long career as a psychiatrist and neurologist, Cerletti published 113 scientific papers, on the pathology of senile plaques in Alzheimer’s disease, on the structure of glia cells, on normal and pathological nervous tissue, on congenital syphilis, on hormones and on endemic goiter. p>