# Carlo Pollonera

Carlo Pollonera (Alexandria, Egypt, March 27, 1849 – Turin, June 17, 1923) was an Italian painter, particularly of landscapes, and also an important malacologist.

## Biography

Carlo Pollonera's father, Giovanni B. Pollonera, was a lawyer in Alexandria. He died when Carlo was a child, after which his mother returned to Italy (Genoa) and remarried. As a seventeen-year-old, Carlo fought with Garibaldi on the Trentino campaign of 1866. In 1865, the family had moved to Turin, where Pollonera began studying painting with Alberto Maso Gilli. He enrolled at the Accademia Albertina and studied under Enrico Gamba and Andrea Gastaldi. Pollonera was a rebellious pupil, wanting to paint exactly what he saw, rather than, for instance, changing a distracting background. This principle not to improve on what he saw remained a hallmark of his painting throughout Pollonera's career. After four years with Gastaldi, in 1873 he switched to study in the private school of Antonio Fontanesi. In January 1875, he travelled with his close friend Carlo Stratta to Paris, where he studied under Thomas Couture and was influenced by the Barbizon school. Other visits were to Milan in 1874 and to Rome between 1900 and 1912, where he associated with Antonio Mancini, Pietro Canonica and John Singer Sargent. His Card Players, one of his first works, was exhibited at the 1873 Promotrice of Turin, where he subsequently exhibited regularly. Among his works are: Canavese; Aprile; Le oche; Tranquillità; Il ballo; La mestizia; Terrena fiorito, and Il Malone. In 1882, he exhibited the life-size portrait of Il seminatore. Some of his paintings are nowadays valued at thousands, or even tens of thousands, of euros.
As a child, Pollonera had become the stepson of the prominent natural scientist and senator Michele Lessona, whose second wife (Pollonera's mother, Adele Masi Lessona) and children were much involved in his scientific output, particularly the translations. Although Pollonera had started to study natural sciences, he soon switched to painting. Nevertheless, from 1882 to 1916 Pollonera wrote over 50 scientific articles on non-marine molluscs. See his bibliography page. Most articles were written in Italian for Italian journals, but there were also instance of articles written in French, English, Portuguese and German for journals of those countries. His peak output was in the decade 1884–1893, when working on the fauna of Italy and adjacent areas; only 16 articles appeared after 1898, when his attention shifted more to the fauna of Africa. Pollonera's first publication was a monograph on Italian slugs in conjunction with his younger half-brother Mario Lessona, but subsequently he was always the sole author. However, the section below on taxa named after Pollonera provides many examples of generous cooperation with other scientists, sometimes authoring species descriptions in other's papers or drawing the plates. Whilst some of his papers are collections of brief notes about disparate topics, others are authoritative monographs about particular taxa. His obituarist Colosi points out that his thorough and keenly-observed species descriptions were appreciated even by those who disagreed with his conclusions about the systematics. His skill as an artist is also apparent in the plates illustrating his articles (see examples below). One particularly important aspect of his research is that he dissected the animals to provide extra anatomical characters; this has since become standard but was "cutting-edge" at the time. This approach is particularly valuable in studying slugs, which was the group that he published most on, although others of his papers concern terrestrial snails and occasionally freshwater and fossil faunas. His collection is in the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturale di Torino.
For 20 years Pollonera was in a relationship with a pianist, whose name is now lost; this was one reason that he remained in Turin. But in 1913 Pollonera married Ulma de'Bartolomeis (1886–1981), 37 years his junior, who had taken private painting classes with him. They are known sometimes to have worked on the same canvas together. There was just one daughter, Sabina (1914–1996). Carlo Pollonera died on 17 June 1923 after a short stay in the San Giovanni hospital in Turin.
Pollonera was not a practising Christian but believed in a superior being. Marziano Bernardi summarised his character as, "silent and a loner by nature, a rebel and intransigent" ["un silenzioso e un solitario per temperamento, un ribelle e un intransigente"]. One striking anecdote is that comments of literary critic and painter Enrico Thovez about the perspective of one of Pollonera's paintings led to Pollonera proposing a duel! Instead the matter was settled in court, and the two protagonists later made up.