Carlo Levi (Turin, 1902 - Rome, 1975) was an Italian painter, writer, physician and anti-fascist. Although he trained as a doctor and is best known for his novel, his career is best understood through painting, which he practised throughout his life and which led to works being shown at the XIV Venice Biennale shortly after he graduated. He was born into a wealthy family of Jewish origin; his maternal uncle, Claudio Treves, led the Italian Socialist Party, and that environment shaped his political commitment.
He studied medicine at the University of Turin, graduating in 1924 with excellent marks. There he befriended Piero Gobetti, who awakened his interest in political activism. For several years he worked as an assistant at Professor Micheli's clinic, researching liver diseases and disorders of the bile ducts, and he also pursued further studies in Paris. By 1927 he had already decided to devote himself to painting. In Paris he came into contact with figures such as Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Alberto Moravia and Giorgio de Chirico, and he lived there almost exclusively from 1932 to 1934.
In 1929 he co-founded, with Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà, becoming leader of its Italian branch alongside Leone Ginzburg. That same year he joined the Gruppo dei Sei, a group of Turin painters. Arrested for his activism, he was exiled between 1935 and 1936 to Aliano and Grassano, villages in the remote region of Lucania (now Basilicata). There he encountered a poverty barely known in prosperous northern Italy, treated the local population as a doctor although he had not practised since graduating, and devoted much of his time to painting. Critics see this exile as marking the end of his lyrical Turin phase and the peak of his figurative development.
After his release he lived in France and then returned to Italy, where he was arrested again in Florence and imprisoned in the Murate prison. He was freed after Mussolini's fall and, sheltering opposite the Pitti Palace, wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945. The novel had a wide impact in Italy and across Europe, was adapted for film by Francesco Rosi in 1979 and has been translated into several languages. His paintings include Portrait of the Father (1921), The Gasometer (1926) and Portrait of Pablo Neruda (1950). After the war he settled in Rome, edited L'Italia Libera from 1945 to 1946 and kept writing, producing works such as L'orologio (The Clock, 1950) and Le parole sono pietre (Words Are Stones, 1955). He served as an independent senator elected on the Communist Party list from 1963 to 1972. He died of pneumonia in Rome in 1975 and was buried in Aliano, as he wished.
His legacy endures in his novel, which remains widely read and has a square named after it, and in a late painting, Apollo and Daphne, made on a goatskin drum the day before he entered hospital, which was shown by the Persiana gallery in Palermo.