Luigi Pericle (1916 2001) was a universally interested and gifted personality, a self-taught illustrator and painter, a man of letters, mystic, theosophist, and intellectual whose work and legacy eludes any categorisation.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, as Pericle Luigi Giovannetti to a mother of French and a father of Italian origin, he had great success as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1950s. His cartoons were published worldwide in satirical magazines like Punch, his comic strip Max the Marmot, published in newspapers and books, was hugely popular across Europe, the United States, and in Japan.

In 1958, Giovannetti took a radical turn to painting and ink drawing. Now signing his works as Luigi Pericle, he quickly gained international recognition as an artist and his paintings were exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Britain and Switzerland during the 1960s. Yet recognition was not what he was looking for and he disappeared voluntarily from the art world to lead an increasingly secluded life dedicated entirely to his art and writing. His home Casa San Tomaso on the legendary Monte Verita near Ascona, in southern Switzerland, offered ideal surroundings for an artist so strongly drawn to spirituality and esotericism.

Luigi Pericle - Ad Astra for the first time explores how the spiritual environment and tradition of Monte Verita influenced Pericle as an artist and how Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism were influential to his drawing practice. Moreover, the book investigates Pericle's understanding of abstraction in art and his own syncretism of modern esotericism and spirituality.

Text in English, German and Italian.