The Italian ceramist, who lived in a tower within Rome’s Aurelian Walls, created occult rituals for firing ceramics with Theosophical, Etruscan, and Tolstoian elements.
by Massimo Introvigne
In 1907, Ernesto Nathan (1845–1921), a London-born Jew and an ardent admirer of Republican thinker Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), was elected Mayor of Rome. Nathan had been Grand Master of the Italian Freemasonry between 1896 and 1903, and with him an anti-clerical cultural milieu became politically dominant in Rome.
Nathan’s programme was strongly inspired by the myth of the Third Rome, the one that as capital of the new Kingdom of Italy will succeed the First Rome of the Roman Empire and the decadent Second Rome dominated by the Catholic Church. Nathan’s program included the celebration of the First Rome through public support of archaeologists, and the creation of a new art by enlisting the help of artists of like-minded ideas.
Prominent about them was painter Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), later to become a well-known Italian futurist. Encouraged by Nathan, Balla started tutoring female painters, including the Mayor’s own daughter, Annie Nathan (1878–1946), who later married Emilio Engel (1878–1944), a Scottish Rite Freemason and the son of the Grand Master of the Masonic Italian Symbolic Rite, Senator Adolfo Engel (1851–1913).
Their group also included Yris Randone (1888–1958), one of the six daughters (and one son) of the idiosyncratic artist Francesco Randone (1864–1935), the “Maestro delle Mura” (Master of the Walls).
Randone was born in Turin but come to Rome in 1870 with his father, a politician who, after Italy’s conquest of Rome and the end of the Papal control of the city, was appointed Under-Secretary for Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce in the government of Giovanni Lanza (1810–1882). Although he never finished the courses of the National Art Academy, Randone quickly emerged as a gifted ceramist and as a draughtsman specialized in drawing for Rome University’s Schools of Anatomy and Biology.
From 1890, he lived in a tower in Rome’s Aurelian Walls. In 1894, he was appointed “Conservatore” of the Aurelian Walls by the Ministry of Education. In the same year, Randone founded a “Scuola d’Arte Educatrice” (School of Educational Art) that still exists in Rome.
Randone’s esoteric interested have been studied and documented in several excellent studies by Italian art historians Giovanna Caterina de Feo and Flavia Matitti.
A close friend and associate of the Masonic artist and Grand Master Ettore Ferrari (1845–1929), and a Freemason himself since 1905, Randone was particularly interested in the religion and art of the Etruscans, a culture that flourished in Central Italy between 800 and 500 BCE. Firing ceramics in pits or kilns eventually became for Randone an “Etruscan” ritual. The happy few invited to participate in these ceremonies, including Balla, received an invitation in the shape of a “host of goodness,” resembling the eucharistic wafer of the Catholic Church but decorated with Pagan, Socialist, and Masonic symbols.
One of the hosts depicted the “Tria Fata,” the three Sibyls of Roman oracles. They were Randone’s daughters Yris, Honoris (1892–1968) and Horitia (1894–1984), dressed in garbs more or less resembling those of Etruscan priestesses as well as the ceremonial gowns worn by Tolstoian communities in Russia and elsewhere.
The three girls also officiated in the ritual of firing ceramics, where Balla was a frequent guest. One participant to these ceremonies, who left an account of them, was the Dutch Baroness Henriëtte Willebeek le Mair (1889–1966), the wife of Baron Hubertus Paulus van Tuyll van Serooskerken (1883–1958), who was the leader of the Dutch branch of the Sufi Order in the West (after 1923 called International Sufi Movement) founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927).
Later, the Baroness brought Inayat Khan to visit Randone in his Rome school, where he delivered a lecture in 1923. The Baroness reported that, in the ritual devised by Randone, he knelt before the furnace with the Three Fates and prayed to the spirits of the fire, before ceremonially starting the baking process.
These were not the only spirits evoked in Randone’s tower. From 1902 to 1912, the artist’s daughter Horitia also acted as a medium in Spiritualist séances, and Spiritualism remained an important part of Randone’s spirituality and worldview.
Randone’s work as ceramist is often mentioned along with that of Duilio Cambellotti (1876–1960), another protégé of Nathan and aficionado of Etruscan art. However, Randone saw in Cambellotti more of a rival than a friend, and they rarely cooperated. In fact, the only continuing link between them was Balla, a common friend.
Both Cambellotti’s experiences and the curious activities of the Master of the Walls confirm the peculiar artistic and cultural climate of Nathan’s Rome, where the search for forms of spirituality capable of challenging the hegemony of Catholicism was a dominant feature. It would not be surprising to learn that Randone—following another of his friends, pedagogist Maria Montessori (1870–1952), who was already a member—had joined the Theosophical Society, as De Feo claims. Although De Feo in her studies of Randone mentions consistently the Theosophical Society, the addresses of the meetings attended by the artist indicate that he mostly participated in the activities of a splinter group, the Independent Theosophical League, where Inayat Khan also lectured. This may explain why Randone is not listed in the registers of the Italian Theosophical Society, nor of the international Society in Adyar; he might have been a member of the splinter group.
Later, in 1920, Randone would show to some visitors “the Golden Chain sent to us by the President of the Theosophical Society,” although who this President was and what the Golden Chain exactly was, remains unclear.
Randone died in 1935, hailed as one of the great ceramists of a forgotten generation that is now, however, being rediscovered through books and exhibitions.
