Death of Sappho

The twenty years between the two wars saw the full, triumphant flowering of Martini's art, which slowly gained acceptance in official circles too; but while Martini, drawing on all his inexhaustible craft, was completing his wearing public commissions (reliefs for the Palazzo di Giustizia, for the Ospedale Maggiore and for the Arengario, all in Milan), perhaps precisely in polemic with the “monuments”, he was conceiving works of extreme vigour and great boldness of invention; on this poignant theme of the poetess's desperate death on the sea rocks the sculptor worked assiduously, in various sketches and variants, striving for an absolute formal distillation, until he reached the extreme essentiality of this group; a rough body, totally assimilated to the stones that support it.