That between Francesco Federico Cerruti and the psychic (and painter) Gustavo Adolfo Rol was a sincere friendship that grew in intensity over time. Cerruti and Rol met in the 1970s thanks to a mutual friend, the art historian Angelo Dragone, and their bond, corroborated by a shared passion for art, went on for around twenty years, until the psychic’s death in 1994.
When Cerruti first crossed the threshold of Rol’s house, he was amazed by the refined taste that characterised its interior and the presence of extraordinary works of art. Over the years, as the familiarity between the two grew, their collections also began to become more permeable, with some works that from Rol’s collection took the road to Cerruti’s, not without, at times, great turmoil for the psychic. This is the case of the two allegories by Pompeo Batoni (Allegoria della Pittura, Scultura e Architettura, 1740, and Apollo, la Musica e la Geometria, 1741), masterpieces from the painter’s early maturity, which, with great reluctance and regret, Rol eventually agreed to hand over to the accountant. Other works now in the Cerruti Collection testify to the esteem and benevolence that bound Cerruti to Rol: the painting Mattina d’autunno (c. 1884) by the Turinese painter Vittorio Avondo; Il porto di Genova (1886), by another Turinese, Enrico Reycend; a flap desk from the late 1870s attributed to Giovanni Galletti; and, finally, a late 18th-century pair of wall tables, probably Roman, which, according to tradition, were given to Rol himself by Umberto II of Savoy. Finally, the personal collection of Andreina Cerruti, sister of Francesco Federico, contained a Vaso con rose painted by the psychic, on this occasion presented to the public for the first time.