Female Bust

Martini's vigorous and overbearing personality practically sums up the course of Italian sculpture between the two wars, since the many statuaries who fed the demagogic rhetoric of the Fascist regime are of no interest beyond the chronicle of the time; the same may be said of the many dabblers who one after another tried to remake the master's daring inventions: Martinism ended up as an academy worse than any other. After 1930, however, ferments and aspirations began to emerge that called for different solutions to figurative problems; precisely in those years Marini and Manzù began to work, and they would soon take on an unmistakable physiognomy; in Milan, as early as 1932, Fontana had signed his first abstract experiments, before throwing himself into exploring all the possibilities of sculpture with a restlessness (from the primitive to the Baroque, to spatial variations) that is the index of an exasperated experimentalism: perhaps only the comparison with Martini can clarify its origin.