Portrait of Ungaretti

Fazzini burst into the history of art with a creative immediacy and a truly admirable native power. He was little more than twenty, this provincial from the Marches transplanted to the imperial masquerade of Rome, when he carved this splendid portrait of the poet, gruff and ironic, aloof in his intrusive humanity. The sculptor aims and races towards the expressive result without hesitation, deliberately ignoring every decorous formal rule; he cuts, patches and reinforces the wood with agitated brutality. The resulting unadorned simplicity, while preserving the immediate vibration of a sanguine and disturbing human nature in its provocative naturalness, attains by force of intuition an authentic, inner monumentality.