Woman combing her hair

If we wish, Manzù's sculpture too could be placed under the sign of naturalism, but then what further richness and what depth of poetic correspondences this attitude towards the objective datum would have! Manzù's true history begins in 1935, after a year of inactivity and deep reconsideration (almost a voluntary exile) in his native Bergamo country, when he cancelled the long cultural labour of the preceding years. He set aside every Egyptian, Etruscan and Romanesque archaism and placed himself, with frank awareness, within the most fertile strand of the immediately preceding sculptural tradition. Medardo Rosso was certainly the most effective catalyst of his sensibility, even if the Bergamo sculptor would immediately bend the rhythm of that vision to unmistakably personal accents. Already in the bronzes of 1935 the fleeting swiftness, the momentary violence of Rosso's images had hardened into a melancholy and closed sensibility, into more inward vibrations.