Franco Magnani (memory artist)

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Franco Magnani (* 1934 in Pontito , district of Pescia ) is an Italian-American, self-taught painter who became known through an essay by Oliver Sacks . According to Magnani and Sacks respectively, Magnani fell ill with a fever in the 1960s and was diagnosed with epilepsy . After this illness Magnani began to perceive childhood memories of Pontito in his dreams with astonishing richness of detail. He painted these pictures over the next 20 years; they closely resembled views of Pontito. Allegedly Magnani had no access to pictures of his hometown. That is why he was also referred to as the “artist of memory”, the representation found its way into a number of representations of unusual neurological cases.

Life

Magnani was born in 1934 as one of five children in Pontito, a settlement on a hill not far from Pescia. The inhabitants of Pontitos lived mainly from agricultural labor. Magnani's father died in an accident in 1942. The mother now had to do the field work, while Magnani took care of the cooking and housekeeping. After the war Magnani worked first as a carpenter , then as a cook on the Italian Riviera and on cruise ships. In 1965 he emigrated to the USA and found work in a restaurant.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Magnani fell ill with a protracted fever. When he had a seizure with the fever, he was treated by a doctor who diagnosed him with temporal lobe epilepsy caused by the fever. After the outbreak of the disease, Magnani said he began to see vivid, very detailed pictures of his hometown before the Second World War and then to convert them into paintings without prior artistic training. In 1975 he married his wife Ruth. The couple ran an art gallery together until their death in 1988.

In 1988 the writer Oliver Sacks spent a few weeks with Franco Magnani and they visited his hometown together. In the same year, the photographer Susan Schwartzenberg took photos from the same angles as in Magnani's paintings. It became clear how detailed Magnani's pictures resembled reality. In 1992, Sacks published an essay in The New Yorker on meeting Magnani , which Sacks included with six other neurological cases in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Back Issues: Franco Magnani , article by Jon Michaud in The New Yorker of August 24, 2010, accessed on May 8, 2018.
  2. ↑ This Man Found His Creative Genius After Going Through a Rare Form of Epilepsy , article on lifenicks.com of November 30, 2017 (Eng.)
  3. ↑ Oliver Sacks: THE LANDSCAPE OF HIS DREAMS . In: New Yorker, July 27, 1992.
  4. ↑ Oliver Sacks: To Anthropologist on Mars . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1995, ISBN 0-679-43785-1 . (Review by Wendy Lesser: Everybody Is Peculiar , New York Times, February 19, 1995.)
personal data
SURNAME Magnani, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Pontito , Italy