"[… ] Of your art I sensed its solitary character and freedom from any compromise.
In your early years at Monteveglio, I remember above all that I perceived your intimate ardour, tormented and tormenting, perhaps confused, but still without artifice or ostentation; it made me think of a phrase of Isaiah, in the Latin of Vulgata: 'Spiritus vester, ut ignis vorabit vos'.
I was very sad because although I was watching with a lot of participation and great affection, I felt powerless: I didn’t know where to start, not saying to put out this fire (I certainly didn’t mean to) but to grasp its meaning and give some indication that may serve to use this accumulation of energies and this burning. It certainly had an effect on me though: when I approached this pyre, it seemed to me that it could help to burn that amount of straw that was in me and in the things I was trying to put together.
I repeat that I have always taken great advantage of our dialogues, and the more they seemed unsuccessful, the more compelled me to rethink many of my acts and attitudes and above all led me to revise the purity of my faith and its religious expressions. This, if I may tell you, at least as a hypothesis: painting, at a certain point, to be truly art and power 'to keep alive, present in our earthly conscience the ultimate sense, the fulfilment of a full image of the man' (however it may understood), does it not itself need to anchor itself to some ontological subsistence?
I know. You are very afraid, and you are right because you see so many cases, of the possibilities of self-deception and mystification, of the simplistic or conventional thrusts of psychological desire. But I think it can’t all be just psychology. There must also be a way out of the 'psychological' and into the things of our spirit.
Even you have admitted it, when a few weeks ago wrote to me 'the possibility of a real inspired movement in the heart made simple in real and conscious pain'. And so, I looked at the last pages you sent me and in which we speak of an infinity contained and expressed in daily life, recognized and accepted as such, and not lived with an alienated conscience.
The real pain accepted with conscious submission, and the hard patience consciously sought and applied to the uniformity of everyday life, break, in my opinion, the magic circle of psychology, in which so often all illusions and confusions are possible and produce, the same as can authentic prayer produce (perhaps because they themselves are prayers) that limpidity of the heart and mind in which, I believe, even art can find itself and its forms more pure. - Monte Sole 25/08/1987-"
Giuseppe Dossetti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with comments by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 54
Epistolary in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, a cura di Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Edizione Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992