Portrait

Unfortunately there were not many artists who, like Martini, sought, in whatever way, a formula for overcoming the soft decadentism of late-19th-century culture. Since Rosso's highly personal poetics proved inimitable, the problem of reconquering an ideal form, in which reality would find a less contingent justification than it had in naturalism, whether of Bartolinian or Gemitian origin, was once again posed with brutal necessity. Diligent statuaries, led by Andreotti and Romanelli, then attempted, and for far too many years afterwards, the ambiguous restoration of an academic neo-Renaissance or neo-Hellenistic rigour; others, like Wildt, chose the more sophisticated path of a tortured intellectualism, always crammed with literary abstrusities. This head by Romanelli already dates from the years of the “Novecento”, but since the time when he helped his father, also a statuary, as his grandfather had been, the sculptor's style shows no break in continuity.