Gustavo Rol

Last updated

Rol in 1924 Gustavo Rol.jpg
Rol in 1924

Gustavo Adolfo Rol (20 June 1903 22 September 1994) was an Italian parapsychologist and painter. His devotees consider him to have been a great spiritual master and have testified to miraculous feats he supposedly accomplished. [1]

Contents

Biography

Rol was born in Turin, Italy, and graduated in law at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law, in 1933. He also studied in London and Paris and began a banking career that took him to other major European cities. He was also an amateur painter and his work was featured in exhibitions at the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli and the Guido Costa Projects. [2] While in Marseille during 1925-1926, he encountered a person who showed him some card tricks, triggering an interest in magical and paranormal phenomena. He pursued deeper spiritual studies and had an experience in Paris of which he wrote in his diary: "I discovered a tremendous law that links the color green, the musical fifth, and heat. I have lost my will to live. I am frightened by power. I shall write no more!" As a result of this crisis, he briefly retreated to a convent.

Upon returning to Italy, Rol became known in aristocratic and political circles in the 1930s. He engaged in various demonstrations of his supposed mystical powers, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and other psychic or magical feats. He also became a friend, among others, of film directors Federico Fellini and Franco Zeffirelli and writer Dino Buzzati. Toward the later part of his life, and after his death, Rol was a focal point of debate in Italy between skeptics and advocates of parapsychology. His alleged mystical powers were never demonstrated, and he repeatedly refused to be cross-examined by other illusionists. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federico Fellini</span> Italian filmmaker (1920–1993)

Federico Fellini was an Italian filmmaker. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+12 as the 10th-greatest film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip V of Spain</span> King of Spain (r. 1700–1724; 1724–1746)

Philip V was King of Spain from 1 November 1700 to 14 January 1724 and again from 6 September 1724 to his death in 1746. His total reign is the longest in the history of the Spanish monarchy, surpassing Philip II. Philip V instigated many important reforms in Spain, most especially the centralization of power of the monarchy and the suppression of regional privileges, via the Nueva Planta decrees, and restructuring of the administration of the Spanish Empire on the Iberian Peninsula and its overseas regions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Emmanuel III</span> King of Sardinia from 1730 to 1773

Charles Emmanuel III was Duke of Savoy, King of Sardinia and ruler of the Savoyard states from 3 September 1730 until his death in 1773. He was the paternal grandfather of the last three mainline Kings of Sardinia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vittoria Colonna</span> Italian poet and noble

Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, was an Italian noblewoman and poet. As an educated, married noblewoman whose husband was in captivity, Colonna was able to develop relationships within the intellectual circles of Ischia and Naples. Her early poetry began to attract attention in the late 1510s and she ultimately became one of the most popular poets of 16th-century Italy. Upon the early death of her husband, she took refuge at a convent in Rome. She remained a laywoman but experienced a strong spiritual renewal and remained devoutly religious for the rest of her life. Colonna is also known to have been a muse to Michelangelo Buonarroti, himself a poet.

<i>Un ballo in maschera</i> 1859 opera by Giuseppe Verdi

Un ballo in maschera is an 1859 opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The text, by Antonio Somma, was based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five act opera, Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniele Manin</span> Italian politician

Daniele Manin was an Italian patriot, statesman and leader of the Risorgimento in Venice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlo Levi</span> Italian painter

Carlo Levi was an Italian painter, writer, activist, independent leftist politician, and doctor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leopoldo Elia</span> Italian politician

Leopoldo Elia was an Italian politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alberto Burri</span> Italian painter

Alberto Burri was an Italian visual artist, painter, sculptor, and physician based in Città di Castello. He is associated with the matterism of the European informal art movement and described his style as a polymaterialist. He had connections with Lucio Fontana's spatialism and, with Antoni Tàpies, an influence on the revival of the art of post-war assembly in the United States as in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luisa Sigea de Velasco</span> Spanish poet

Luisa Sigea de Velasco, also known as Luisa Sigeia, Luisa Sigea Toledana and in the Latinized form Aloysia Sygaea Toletana, was a poet and intellectual, one of the major figures of Spanish humanism, who spent a good part of her life in the Portuguese court in the service of Maria of Portugal (1521–1577), as her Latin teacher. André de Resende wrote the following epitaph for her: Hic sita SIGAEA est: satis hoc: qui cetera nescit | Rusticus est: artes nec colit ille bonas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernardo de' Dominici</span> Italian painter

Bernardo De Dominici or Bernardo de Dominici or Bernardo de' Dominici (1683–1759) was an Italian art historian and minor landscape and genre painter, active mainly in his native Naples. He is now best known as the author of the Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, a three-volume collection of biographies of Neapolitan artists, for which he is sometimes called the Vasari of Naples.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tommaso Palamidessi</span> Italian esotericist (1915–1983)

Tommaso Palamidessi was an Italian esotericist. Drawn to astrology, parapsychology, and yoga-tantric doctrines, he was active in the field of the occult and developed a form of Esoteric Christianity that he called Archeosophy. In 1968 he founded the Archeosophical Society in Rome, which is still active and has several thousand members in Italy and the rest of Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renaissance magic</span> Magical science during the Renaissance

Renaissance magic was a resurgence in Hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of the magical arts which arose along with Renaissance humanism in the 15th and 16th centuries CE. During the Renaissance period, magic and occult practices underwent significant changes that reflected shifts in cultural, intellectual, and religious perspectives. C. S. Lewis, in his work on English literature, highlighted the transformation in how magic was perceived and portrayed. In medieval stories, magic had a fantastical and fairy-like quality, while in the Renaissance, it became more complex and tied to the idea of hidden knowledge that could be explored through books and rituals. This change is evident in the works of authors like Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare, who treated magic as a serious and potentially dangerous pursuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leopoldo Mugnone</span> Italian composer

Leopoldo Mugnone was an Italian conductor, especially of opera, whose most famous work was done in the period 1890–1920, both in Europe and South America. He conducted various operatic premieres, and was also a composer of operas.

<i>Fédora</i>

Fédora is a play by the French author Victorien Sardou. It opened at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris on 11 December 1882, and ran for 135 performances. The first production starred Sarah Bernhardt. She wore a soft felt hat in that role which was soon a popular fashion for women; the hat became known as a fedora.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giovanni Battista Quadrone</span> Italian painter (1844–1898)

Giovanni Battista Quadrone was an Italian painter, mainly of genre scenes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia Bourbon del Monte</span> Italian noble (1899–1945)

DonnaVirginia Bourbon del Monte dei principi di San Faustino was the wife of Edoardo Agnelli and the mother of Gianni Agnelli.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guido Seborga</span> Italian painter

Guido Seborga, pseudonym of Guido Hess, was an Italian journalist, poet, painter and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luisa Massimo</span> Italian paediatrician (1928–2016)

Luisa Massimo was an Italian pediatrician. From 1972 to 1997 she was the director of the 4th Division of Pediatrics of the Children's Hospital Istituto Giannina Gaslini of Genoa. From 1998 she is director emeritus. She is internationally considered one of the founders of Pediatric oncology

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurent Pécheux</span> Italian painter

Laurent Pécheux was a French-born painter, active in Rome and Northern Italy in a Neoclassical-style.

References

  1. "Gustavo Rol". www.vitaumana.it. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
  2. "Gustavo Rol | Art". www.mutualart.com. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
  3. "The Impossible Possibilities of Gustavo Rol". Issimo. 20 November 2020. Retrieved 11 August 2021.

Further reading