Tag: italy

Antonio Sant’ Elia

Antonio Sant’ Elia, Architectural Drawings and Computer Realizations

On October 10, 1916, Antonio Sant’Elia died fighting Austro-Hungarian forces at the eighth Battle of the Isonzo near Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast. The Italian architect was just 28 years old and left behind only one completed building, his Villa Elisi in Brunate, outside of Como.

Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis (1927) or watched Harrison Ford hunt replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is already familiar with Sant’Elia’s imaginative vision of the city of the future. His fantastical designs inspired the visual worlds of those two films, and even today, 100 years after his death, the future he envisioned still resonates.

The work Sant’Elia is best known for—Città Nuova or “New City” in Italian—came with machine-like superstructures, stepped skyscrapers interlaced with suspended walkways and highway overpasses. Designed between 1912 and 1914, it was intended to be the architectural remedy to Modernism’s perceived disconnect from lived experience.

Sant’Elia believed that the primary task of a city in the industrial age should be to facilitate movement in the most efficient way possible. For his Città Nuova, he proposed three levels of traffic according to vehicle and speed: pedestrian overpasses, roads for cars, and tracks for tramways. These, along with vertical elevator shafts, were the only traffic arteries in the city. Sant’Elia also proposed that the city exist in a state of continuous construction. “We must invent and rebuild the…city,” he wrote. “It must be like an immense, tumultuous, lively, noble work site, dynamic in all its parts.”

Giovanni Colacicchi

Giovanni Colacicchi, “Fine d’ Estate”, (End of Summer), 1932, Oil on Canvas, Gallery of Modern Art, Florence, Italy

Born in 1900 at the ancient town of Anagni, Giovanni Colacicchi was an influential figurative painter of Italy’s Novecento artistic movement. Launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, Novecento’s members rejected Europeanavant-garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical Italian manner. The group wished to create an art that was associated with the nationalistic rhetoric of Italy’s fascist regime. 

The son of Roberto Colacicchi and Pia Vannutelli, Colacicchi completed his classical studies in Rome. He arrived in Florence in 1916 and worked as an assistant at the Scolopi school. Colacicchi volunteered for military service after the defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto in 1917; however, hostilities had ceased before his military train reached the front lines in 1918. He enrolled in 1920 at the University of Florence’s Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. Colacicchi studied painting under Francesco Franchetti and would later write one of the few contemporary biographic works on Franchetti’s life. 

While at the University of Florence, Colacicchi frequented the Giubbe Rosse Cafe, an important meeting place for Florentine artists and intellectuals among whom were sculptor Giuseppe Graziosi and writers Alessandro Bonsanti, Alberto Carocci and Elio Vittorini. In 1922, he set up his first studio in the Borgo San Jacopo district of Florence. Colacicchi was a co-founder of the political and literary newspaper “La Rivista di Firenze” in 1924;  he contributed an article “Sulle Arti del Disegno (On the Art of Drawing)” and two poems for the paper. 

In September of 1924, Giovanni Colacicchi married Amalia Zanotti, a daughter of a noble family from Biella who introduced him to the landscapes of the Calabrian region. This marriage would later be annulled and he would marry painter Flavia Arlotta who would remain with him until his death. In October, Colacicchi exhibited his “Malinconia (Melancholy)” at the Palazzo della Esposizioni held at the Parterre di San Gallo; through this important work, he would be introduced to the Novecneto movement. In 1926, Colacicchi presented his work to positive reviews at the “Novecento Italiano” exhibition in Milan which also included works by Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, and Giorgio Morandi.

From 1928 to 1948, Colacicchi exhibited his work regularly at the Biennale of Venice and participated in all the other major exhibitions. In 1930, he had his first solo exhibition at the Saletta Fantini in Piazza Santa Trinita. After designing stage sets for the Scala in Milan in 1931, Colacicchi painted his 1932 “Fine d’Estate (End of Summer)”, later purchased in 1992 by Milan’s Gallery of Modern Art, and began his “Giacobbe e l’Angelo (Jacob and the Angel)”. After two more solo shows, he exhibited his “Jacob and the Angel” at the nineteenth Venice Biennial. In June of 1936, Colacicchi had a major exhibition of work, including paintings done during a year stay in South Africa, at the Galleria Fantechi.

In 1940, Colacicchi became a professor at Florence’s Accademia di Bella Arti, a position he would hold until 1970. Evacuated with his family to the Florence subdivision of Vallombrosa in 1943, Colacicchi and his family were guests of art historian Bernard Berenson at the Casa al Dono. While residing there, he posed his model Guido Fabiani tied to a tree and painted his 1943 “San Sebastian”. During these war years, Colacicchi and his family took into their home both Allied soldiers who escaped from German prison camps and Jewish families in danger of being caught.

After the liberation of Florence in August of 1944, Colacicchi became the Rector of the Accademia de Bell Arts and was called to join the Urban Commission for the Reconstruction of Florence to oversee historic conservation of both its urban landscape and monuments. Besides his portraits, landscapes, and monumental figure studies, he created numerous decorations for public buildings in Italy. On the twenty-second of January in 1947, Colacicchi exhibited his work in a group show entitled “Nuevo Umanesimo (New Humanism)” that cited its opposition  to the new wave of abstraction and supported objectivity in  the subject’s representation, both pictorial and sculptural. He continued to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions through the rest of his years primarily in Italy but also in Germany, Sweden, and Spain. 

In 1991, a retrospective entitled “Giovanni Colacicchi” was published by Idea Books in Milan. On the twenty-seventh of December in 1992, Giovanni Colacicchi, still at work on his paintings, died in his family’s home in Florence’s Via dell’Osservatorio. The private archive of Giovanni Colacicchi and his second wife Flavia Arlotta, deposited by their children Piero and Francesco in 2011, is preserved at the Archivio Contemporaneo “Alessandro Bonsanti” of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence.  

Notes:  The official Giovanni Colacicchi website, which contains a year by year biography and multiple galleries of his work, is located at: http://www.giovannicolacicchi.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Giovanni Colacicchi”, circa 1920s, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Giovanni Colacicchi, “Landscape, 1941, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image:Giovanni Colacicchi, “La Via Lattea con Spirale (The Milky Way with Spiral)”, 1980, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Giovanni Colacicchi and Flavia Arlotta”, circa 1935-40, Vintage Print

 

Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene, “Martyrium (San Sebastiano)”, 2011, Oil on Linen, 101.6 x 91.4 cm, Private Collection

Arrivabene’s masterful paintings have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Johann Schilling

Johann Schilling, “Monument to Maximilian of Austria”. Detail of the Personification of One of the Four Continents, Bronze, 1875, Piazza Venezia Trieste, Italy

The monument by Johann Schilling was inaugurated April 3, 1875 at the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph. The bronze monument to 8 meters high, consists of the statue of Maximilian in uniform admiral resting on a high drum decorated with reliefs depicting the Austrian flags.

An octagonal base reproduces the personifications of the four continents, alternating with small medallions with the symbols of science, poetry, the arts and industry, and several inscriptions.

Reblogged from and with thanks to http://hadrian6.tumblr.com

Emanuele Roncov

Paintings by Emanuele Ronco (Rems 182)

Italian artist Emanuele Ronco (better known as Rems 182) of Truly Design produces graffiti works that blur the line between reality and surrealism. His latest creations include portraits that present multiple perspectives of a person’s face and hands that tend to blend into one another. There’s a softness to each image that allows the various expressions to complement each other while revealing the complexities of human emotion.

Rems 182’s murals are highly symbolic. They offer thought-provoking visuals that push the viewer to wonder which face is any given person’s real one. Is it just one of them or are they all real? The artist also includes images of skulls in his collection, symbolizing both death and rebirth.

Daniel Crespi

Daniel Crespi, “Cain Killing Abel”, Oil on Canvas, 1618-1620

This striking image, depicting the struggle between Cain and Abel, is an early work of the artist, datable to circa 1618/20.  Its recent cleaning has allowed its assesment as a signed work by the artist.

Despite his short career (the artist died in his early 30’s), Crespi’s pictoral style developed markedly, and drew on a wide spectrum of sources.  This Cain and Abel shows traits of his work in the last years of the second decade of the 17th Century, with lingering mannerist traces of the influence of  Cerano and Giulio Cesare Procaccini.  It has been suggested that it is part of a group of drawings and paintings wherein Crespi was working through issues of anatomy and movement, and all are related in their sense of dynamism.

Included in this group are two drawings of anatomical studies in the Ambrosiana  as well as a drawing in a private collection.  These studies are not necessarily preparatory for the present canvas, but appear to show Crespi working through issues that he faced with the compostion.  A lost painting by Crespi of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, known through copies, demonstrates similar concerns.

Francesco Borromini

Baroque Architecture of Francesco Borromini

Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli, was an Italian architect born in today’s Ticino who, with his contemporaries Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.

A keen student of the architecture of Michelangelo and the ruins of Antiquity, Borromini developed an inventive and distinctive, if somewhat idiosyncratic, architecture employing manipulations of Classical architectural forms, geometrical rationales in his plans and symbolic meanings in his buildings.

He seems to have had a sound understanding of structures, which perhaps Bernini and Cortona, who were principally trained in other areas of the visual arts, lacked. His soft lead drawings are particularly distinctive. He appears to have been a self-taught scholar, amassing a large library by the end of his life.

Probably because his work was idiosyncratic, his subsequent influence was not widespread but is apparent in the Piedmontese works of Camillo-Guarino Guarini and, as a fusion with the architectural modes of Bernini and Cortona, in the late Baroque architecture of Northern Europe.

Titian

Titian, “Polyptych of the Resurrection: St Sebastian”, Oil on Canvas, 1520-22, Santi Nazaro e Celso, Brescia, Italy

In 1520 to 1522, Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, painted the “Polyptych of the Resurrection”, also known as the Averoldi Polytych, for the Catholic church Santi Nazaro e Celso, located in Lombardy region of Itlay. The work was commissioned by Alberto Averoldi, the papal legate to Venice. The use of a compatmentally-divided polytych, rather old-fashioned for that time, was likely a specific request from Averroldi. The work was delivered in 1522 and placed behind the high altar, replacing the existing altarpiece by Renaissance painter Vincenzo Foppa.

The five panels in the polyptych are: “The Resurrection of Christ”, “Saints Nazarius and Celsus with Donor”, “Saint Sebastian”. “Angel of the Annunciation”, and “The Annunciation of the Virgin”. Titian unified the panels of the polyptych to a certain degree by chromatic-dynamic, converging the sense of light towards the central scene of the Christ.

The panel showing St Sebastian (bottom right panel of the polyptych) was finished by 1520. Jacopo Tebaldi, the representative of the Duke of Ferrara, was so impressed by the painting when he saw it in Titian’s workshop that he urged his master buy it. Tebaldi offered to pay Titian 60 ducats for this single panel – Averoldi was paying him only 200 ducats for the entire altarpiece. In the end, however, the Duke of Ferrara shied away from making the purchase, probably afraid of annoying the powerful legate Averoldi.

Titian approximates sculpture in the figure of St Sebastian, taking inspiration from one of the slave of Michelangelo’s tomb for Julius II. He shows as much of the saint’s back and front as he can and endows his flesh with a richly tinted marble-like sheen that both absorbs and reflects the light.