Carlo Zinelli (alias known as Carlo) is among the most important creators of art brut that Italy has ever known. Zinelli was born in 1916 in a small farm village near Verona e suffered severe trauma following his experiences during the war. In 1947 his family had him admitted in a psychiatric hospital  where his conditions worsened. His life in the facility is probably the subject of his early artistic endevour, graffiti that he engraved on the hospital walls. He begun painting in 1957 when a creative studio was founded in the hospital and would keep on painting for the next fourteen years. His first works staged rows of almost identical characters and they are probably representations of the activities he was involved with in the facility courtyard together with the other inmates. Between these figures Zinelli uses to paint small boats, birds and animals, filling up the whole surface but with a very keen sense of space and figurative balance. In the sixties he discovers a new technique and begins painting figures of men, of horses and others on a painted background, usually arranging these figures in groups of four. Later on he would add letters and words. He gave up painting when he was transferred in a different institution in 1971. He died in 1974.