MARTINI, ARTURO. - Sculptor, b. at Treviso on 11 Aug. 1899, d. at Milan on 22 March 1947. After the school of the sculptor Carlini at Treviso and that of Urbano Nono at Venice, he went to Munich to study under Adolf Hildebrand. In 1921 he took part in the movement of plastic values and, four years later, held his first solo exhibition at Milan.
At the First Roman Quadriennale of 1931 he received the national prize for sculpture, and the broadest Italian and foreign recognition at the XVIII Venice International Biennale (1932). In 1929 he accepted a teaching post at the Higher Institute for Artistic Industries at the Royal Villa of Monza and, in his last years (1942), the chair of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice. Having moved beyond naturalism, M. represents, after Medardo Rosso, the most remarkable and vital voice of the early Italian twentieth century: his experiments and his achievements, of a new language at once daring and traditional, popular and artistic, are evident in the Sposa felice (1929), Il pastore (1930), La lupa (1931), La convalescente (1932), Il Tobiolo (1934), Donna che nuota sott'acqua (1941), Tito Livio (1942). In his sculptures there is sometimes something like an elementary idea, at other times instead a character probed to the point of attaining an almost awkward but psychologically true humor, at still other times the analytical study of a formal beauty, often a violent predominance of matter or a remote dream of prehistoric epochs, always an elegiac and highly personal musical rhythm. On Christian art and on his own art M. wrote: « Christ represents for us the greatest and most expressive figure. The total vision of being is established with the Incarnation; with Christ expression is born for us, that is, the antithesis of Greek Olympianism.
« As a Christian I feel that my world begins with the Nativity: on that day the vaguest and most mysterious story was born. In Christianity I represent the most living part of myself. Before a religious theme artists become themselves personages of the sacred world ». Among his works on sacred subjects are to be remembered: in ceramic: La Giuditta, La fuga in Egitto, S. Sebastiano; in terracotta: La Via Crucis, La Deposizione, Adamo ed Eva, La cacciata dal Paradiso Terrestre; in wood: S. Giacomo apostolo for the church of the same name at Vago Veronese; in bronze: the Tobiolo, and the S. Cuore for the church of Cristo Re in Rome. Within a formal solidity and a fullness of spiritual life M. modeled the great allegorical bas-reliefs: La giustizia corporativa for the Palace of Justice of Milan and, for the Milanese Arengario, L'Editto di Costantino, S. Ambrogio, S. Carlo comunica gli appestati, Gli Sforza e i Visconti. In the Figliol prodigo (1926, Acqui, Ospizio Ottolenghi), which is perhaps his masterpiece, he sought to place an autobiographical accent; in the Fondazione dell'Ospedale del Perdono di Milano (1939, there Ospedale Maggiore), he defined the character of his plastic narratives.
Bibliography8 works
Giovanni Fallani
