Giovanni Bragolin (real name Bruno Amadio) is a famous Italian painter. He is one of the most mysterious painters, the author of the popular "Gypsy Cycle" of paintings.
Biography
Bruno was born in 1911 in Venice. He became interested in painting as a child. To learn how to draw, Amadio entered the academy, but without graduating from an educational institution, he decided to develop further in art on his own.
Although the artist lived in the last century, surprisingly little information has survived about him. It is reliably known that during the Second World War, Bruno Amadio fought on the side of Mussolini. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, he went to live in Spain and there changed his name to Giovanni Bragolin.
The artist did not give interviews to journalists, and art critics did not write reviews of his work. There are practically no personal photographs of the painter left.
Bragolin made his living by selling his paintings to tourists.
As for his personal life, it is only known that Bragolin was married and had children. The painter died in 1981 in Padua from cancer.
Creation
Bruno liked to paint real life: scenes from everyday life, flowers, butterflies, various historical events.
Paintings depicting crying children brought him real fame.
Bragolin combined them into the famous "Gypsy cycle", which consisted of more than fifty portraits of crying children. It is not clear why, the author gave them such a name, because the kids depicted on the canvases bear little resemblance to real gypsies.
Despite their controversial subject matter, these paintings were an overwhelming success.
Reproductions of paintings of the "Gypsy Cycle" were massively bought up in a short time by both poor and very wealthy people. The artist sold them through bookstores and shops.
Crying boy
Giovanni Bragolin's calling card is the painting "The Crying Boy". However, its popularity is associated not only with the skill of the artist, but also with the mystical rumors that surrounded this canvas.
The portrait was officially recognized as a "cursed painting", bearing grief to its owners, even in the form of ordinary reproductions.
The history of the creation of the canvas has several versions. According to one of them, the "crying boy" is the artist's own son, who was terrified of fire. While posing, the father allegedly specially brought burning matches to the baby's face in order to induce plausible reactions of fear and panic. As a result, the master achieved the desired realism in painting the canvas, and the boy in hysterics cursed his parent, and after a while he died in a fever from severe pneumonia.
The second version - the "crying" paintings depicts an orphan from an orphanage, which allegedly burned down during the war.
It is not known for certain which story is true, but there is a real fact, violent fires occurred in the houses where the Crying Boy reproductions were. The fire destroyed everything in its path, except for a strange portrait. When dismantling the rubble, firefighters found reproductions of Bragolin's works practically untouched by the flame.
As a result, bad rumors began to circulate about the "weeping canvases", which over time became overgrown with more and more terrifying details.
So, in the mid-80s of the last century, a wave of inexplicable fires with many human casualties swept through England. As it turned out over time, all the tragic events were united by the fact that in all burnt houses there was a reproduction of one of Giovanni Bragolin's paintings, which remained intact.
As a result, in the fall of 1985, an official mass burning of images of a crying child collected from people was organized. In a huge fire, many copies of the "damned painting" were burned.
Remarkably, regular fires have really stopped. The press of that time preserved articles about this strange and mystical story.
