Arturo Martini — the sculptures

Two years before his death, which occurred in 1947 and can certainly be called premature (he was born in Treviso in 1889), Arturo Martini published a short collection of reflections under the title La scultura lingua morta (Sculpture, a Dead Language).

If so drastic a condemnation, already in its title, came from an artist such as he, who had experimented with everything this form of expression made possible, dominating the scene in the period between the two wars, the temptation to embrace his theses might well be strong; after all, he had put them into practice ahead of time in 1939, abandoning sculpture for a couple of years and devoting himself to painting.

In reality, in those twenty or so pages he was rather denouncing all the limits of "statuary", of the sculpture-monument, such as funerary sculpture ("the portrait seems to foreshadow the cemetery") and that, enslaved to the content, of the Fascist regime ("... it is a form of oratory or, at best, of eloquence.

Its only job is to celebrate gods, saints and heroes").

He could with good reason call himself weary of the great deal of work done for commemorative or official occasions, such as the works for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan, which he accepted because "this is my trade" and towards which he had a contradictory attitude: at times impatient and dissatisfied with the results, at others aware of having produced "eternal works".

The deciding factor, however, always concerned the work, not the client; if what he had produced matched his sensibility and imagination, he could declare himself enthusiastic about it, as in the case of the Sforza Group, the Tito Livio or the Woman Swimming Under Water, whereas he literally called the Victory made for the Naples Post Office "rubbish" and thought it only right that the Neapolitans had renamed it "la befana" (the old witch).

But Martini, fortunately, had many contradictions; while working on the high reliefs for the Arengario in Milan (1940-42) he produces a marble such as The Bull, which heralds the incredible freedom of form of the Decomposition of the Bull (1943), and after trying his hand at painting he returns to sculpture, finally creating that last great masterpiece, the monument to a partisan who died at thirty, to which he gives the title Palinuro, evoking the myth of Aeneas's adolescent helmsman, snatched from life while searching the stars for a better world.

In the Palinuro it is incredible how Martini managed, only two years after the end of the war, to avoid all war rhetoric. It is said that Arturo Martini, born into a poor family (his father worked as a cook), did not receive much schooling, although there is much of the Venetian turn of phrase in his claim that he repeated the first year of elementary school twice and the second year three times.

He certainly left school early, starting work at thirteen as an errand boy in a goldsmith's shop, and was very precocious in his artistic education, with an ability to see things in their form, and to be fascinated by them, that went back to his earliest childhood.

He daydreamed about the shapes his father gave to butter with the pastry syringe, about the little houses of Nativity cribs, about a pair of little women's shoes made of bread; in his recollections he tells how one of his sculptures from 1913, the Pierrot, was "a reworking of the elements of the whistles sold at fairs: the rider astride a little goose."

Simple objects like the toys of days gone by, smooth surfaces like those of ocarinas and spinning tops, the wooden ladles of mountain people, malleable materials like butter: these are perhaps stimuli that left a mark still traceable in the mature artist, and they certainly bear witness to his extraordinary attention to form, given that he cites them many years later, in 1944.

That same attentiveness and ability to capture would also allow him to draw inspiration from the most diverse forms of artistic expression, from archaic to Etruscan, and on to Romanesque and Neoclassical.

His first material was clay: perhaps because it was so easy to model, perhaps because he could find it easily, stealing it (so the story goes) from the carts that carried it to a ceramics factory near his home.

In 1906 he attended the studio of the sculptor Antonio Carlini, who passed on to him his own love for the sculpture of Canova, and the following year he exhibited eight works, of extremely free construction, at an exhibition held in Treviso.

He moved to Venice in 1908, studying with Urbano Nono and at the free school of the nude of the Accademia di Belle Arti, then to Munich, where his teacher was Adolf von Hildebrand and he steeped himself in classical culture, spending many hours of the day in museums admiring the plaster casts of the great artists of the past such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Luca della Robbia.

In Paris he came into contact with the experiments of the avant-garde, without being particularly struck by them.

All things considered, he would always remain self-taught, impatient of rules; and even his adherence to the cultural movements of the time can be considered rather anarchic.

He was interested in the "craft", and if he learned from anyone, it was from the rough-hewers of Carrara, from whom he humbly learned the techniques and tricks that allowed him to overcome a certain hesitancy in tackling marble.

He would find the forms to give his works only within himself; speaking of the terracotta The Dream and of the stone statue in Vicenza The Convalescent, he confesses: "My sickness is graver than my creative strength. And so I began to work in reverse and plucked out my eyes, which were my illness, for having seen all the statues in the world." In his recollections one finds more enthusiasm for the slightest manifestations of nature than for any work of art; even if, speaking of the Tito Livio, which "takes your breath away", he points out its thirteenth-century attitudes in the manner of Arnolfo di Cambio, elsewhere one can read that "... blades of grass, for me, have particular influences on my poetic state.

I believe that grass is the most marvellous thing in the universe".

The legs of the bronze The Cow have no hooves, because Martini saw it, in the memory that allows an image to be alive, walking on the soft ground of newly sprung grass, and the rhythm of the work is "the rhythm of the grass." This wonder in the face of nature is perhaps what makes Arturo Martini an artist endowed with a popular, at times primitive spirit, capable of telling stories in a simple and free way, for example in the terracotta or ceramic "little theatres" of 1927-28, set in a fairy-tale world and an enchanted atmosphere, such as The Scarecrow in Love and The Lovers.

The theme of memory, which is in reality elaboration and leads him to make bold statements such as "the real does not exist unless you have it in your memory; then it is a living image", might explain, together with his great capacity to see, assimilate and re-create, his much-criticised eclecticism and his excessive openness to the artistic forms of every age, for which he was also accused of mannerism.

"All the statues seen" that live in his memory are the sickness that stirs his inspiration and that he tries to drive out, producing tirelessly, testing every technique and material (impossible not to mention the tormented wood of Maternity) and passing through every period and style of sculpture, while his search moves towards the forms of nature, on a journey, as he told his students at the Accademia in Venice, in which to encounter waterfalls, plains, sky, water.

The game of quotations or sources so beloved of critics, however, can be both instructive and entertaining.

For The Prodigal Son, comparisons have been drawn with Canova's Funerary Monument to Maria Christina of Austria (though it is certain that some of Canova's sketch models find an echo in many of Martini's small terracottas), with Roman imperial sculpture of the age of Trajan and Constantine, with Romanesque sculpture such as the group of the Charity of St. Martin in the Duomo di Lucca, with Verrocchio's Incredulity of St. Thomas, and finally with Giotto's Kiss of Judas.

But from all these (probable) suggestions Arturo Martini extracted only what he had, in his own words, "clear in his head", creating a work that is exactly the opposite of the learned, intellectualising quotation, immersed in a mysterious suspension that erases every academic reference and truly does take the breath away of anyone who looks at it.

And to think that, speaking of this work, he himself had recalled the heads of Olympia, and said that "the Italian history of forms is summed up in it: Donatello, Verrocchio."

The game could go on forever: Canova again for La Pisana in pietra serena of 1928-29 and the restrained sensuality of the Woman Swimming Under Water; an Egyptian sculpture, the so-called Washerwoman, for The She-Wolf; Vincenzo Gemito for the Tobiolo (although Martini speaks of Ammannati's fountain in Piazza della Signoria in Florence); in the terracotta Solitude one undoubtedly reads a landscape by Sironi, and so on.

Thirst and The Drinker, both works in Finale stone, might bring to mind certain bodies found at Pompeii, but it is more legitimate, to suspend the empty little game of sources, to hold that their vitality springs rather from the precise choice of the material in which they are carved, from the inspiring force of the element of water, and perhaps also from Martini's impatience with the unnaturalness of statuary: "I said it in a lesson too: all those standing statues!" The sculptures