‘Tre per un topo’: A Journey into Toti Scialoja’s First Illustrated Book

Artist Toti Scialoja (1914-1998) was a man of many talents: while a poet, first and and foremost, he quit writing after a negative review and for years devoted himself to painting and set design. He rediscovered his literary vocation at the beginning of the Sixties, while in Paris: there he began writing nonsense illustrated poems for his nephew. The outcome of his work between 1961 and 1969 was an artisanal volume, destined only for domestic use, that preceded his books of nonsense verses. I was able to find and publish that splendid notebook, Tre per un topo, in a versione anastatica in 2014. The mouse is Scialoja himself: the identification between mouse and man, which derives from a childhood memory – his grandmother used to call him her ‘tiny little American mouse’ – was made explicit in this unforgettable nonsense rhyme:

Quando il sorcio
beve un sorso
di fernet
si contorce
dal rimorso
d’esser me.

Tre per un topo provide us with many clues about Scialoja’s working method and provides key clarifications on the chronology of the iconographic sources that inspired his nonsense writings. While preparing his books Scialoja in fact went back to the visual sources of his childhood (Edward Lear’s limericks and the Corriere dei Piccoli’s strips, among others), especially to J.J. Grandville’s book Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1842). Grandville, a French caricaturist, aimed to educate the reader-observer toward a new dynamic of the image. No longer would the illustrations provide a support for the text but, rather, they would guide and perturb it, transforming the book into an object féerique. The world of the Scènes is both an ironic portrait of the clichés of the French bourgeoisie as well as a bestiary that displays the ferocity of the animal world.

The revival of Grandville’s drawings by Scialoja cannot be fully understood unless one bears in mind the many literary and visual parodies present in his poetry. A specific example of the importance of this attitude can be found in the “istrice, attrice illustre” (a porcupine, illustrious actress), protagonist of one of Scialoja’s most famous poems:

L’istrice, attrice illustre
recita parti tristi
con gli occhi lustri lustri
inchiostrati di bistri.

Did the poem inspire the illustration, or vice versa? The illustration in Grandville’s Scènes, which represents a porcupine-actress, seemed to have inspired the entire text of the poem and not only the drawing that accompanies it. But when did the Grandvillian influence come into play? It is likely that Scialoja was initially inspired by just the text of the Scènes, which faithfully describes the image of the animal. In Tre per un topo [Fig. 1], the illustration of the porcupine appears, in fact, to be quite undeveloped, completely devoid of the refinement of each stroke that is typical of Grandville: equipped with tiny shoes that resemble Greek cothurni and a handkerchief, the animal sports a messily drawn snout, a vest, and he bears no trace of bistre-inked eyes.

Fig. 1

Rather, in the plate that was proposed for publication [Fig. 2 and 3], Scialoja was inspired by Grandville even in the style of drawing. Compared with Tre per un topo, the illustrative style changed radically, to resemble more the French source closely, only a few details of which were modified: the little animal actors and the backdrop of the Scènes disappeared altogether, while the details of the makeup and of a handkerchief that alluded to the “parti tristi” (sad parts) appeared. It is as if Scialoja aimed at translating Grandville’s bestiary into the atmosphere of the twentieth century, embodied in his animals full of anxieties, doubts, and neurosis. This is just one example of the complexity of Scialoja’s creative process: the double movement of listening and seeing the word itself reflects on the genesis of the illustration.

Fig. 2.                                            Fig. 3