br />A special focus is devoted to the Bolognese creative environment of Il Setaccio, the monthly magazine of the GIL, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, in Bologna (November 1942 and May 1943), in particular on the drawings by Pasolini and Fabio Mauri, produced for this magazine. This proves the determination of a friendship, which is also a continuous exchange of ideas, and Pasolini's growing passion for art history. A strong interest, also born in Bologna around the pivotal figure of Roberto Longhi, whom the writer asked to write his degree thesis on 20th-century Italian painting, from Carlo Carrà to Giorgio Morandi and Filippo de Pisis, artists he himself loved very much.
From the 1950s onwards, his arrival in Rome, writing and cinema became for Pasolini the time for an increasingly fervid melting pot of artistic and creative experiences that would partly, but only partly, distance him from painting as a practice but not as a conceptual progress and technical interest. This is reflected in many of his little-known writings dedicated to painting itself.
In these years, Pasolini's interest in the subject matter, his confrontation with the contemporary world and the specificity of portraiture became the identifying features of his pictorial reality in continuous progress and very often dedicated to his "best friends". From the portraits of Ninetto Davoli, Maria Callas, Laura Betti, Andrea Zanzotto, to the series of drawings dedicated to Longhi. These are all works from the 1950s-1970s that clearly underline the semantic value of Pasolini's reproduction of the human body, always carried out with great stylistic coherence and still of Longhi extraction.
These works also reveal the continuity of Pasolini's pictorial practice and the technical obstinacy with which he confronts this production as a protagonist. Moreover, the artist is always more interested in "composition" - with its contours - than in the material", in line with that pictorial phase of Italian art which, precisely between the 1960s and 1970s, was increasingly defined by the civil commitment with which it was saturated.

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