At Vittoriale degli Italiani, Mastroianni's sculptures dialogue with D'Annunzio and Quasimodo

From March 12 to September 11, 2022, the Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera is hosting the exhibition Il bronzo e la parola. Mastroianni, D’Annunzio and Quasimodo, which compares fourteen large bronze sculptures by Umberto Mastroianni (Fontana Liri, 1910 - Marino, 1998) with poems by Gabriele D’Annunzio (Pescara, 1863 - Gardone Riviera, 1938) and Salvatore Quasimodo(Modica, 1901 - Naples, 1968). The works are arranged in the Vittoriale Park, a combination of enchanted nature and that visionary “book of living stones” with which the Vate wanted to crown his “inimitable living”: the exhibition is intended to be an unprecedented dialogue between sculpture and words, between matter and poetry.

Mastroianni’s works include the two busts of 1939 still tied to classical forms, Uomo of 1942 that opens to abstract language, passing through the energetic and disruptive Furia selvaggia of 1975, to the masterpieces of the 1980s such as Macchina sacrale (1988-1989), a 220 cm high bronze, the last of his monumental works: Mastroianni’s sculptures find echoes, meanings and references in the selected poems of two of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. Curated by Marco Di Capua and Paola Molinengo Costa, the exhibition is promoted by the Vittoriale degli Italiani together with the Centro Studi dell’Opera di Umberto Mastroianni and Cigno GG Edizioni of Rome, in collaboration with Villaggio Globale International, and was inaugurated as part of the event that Vittoriale President Giordano Bruno Guerri wanted to title “Unique Forms of Continuity in Time.”

It is known that in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s eclecticism of collecting, sculpture occupies a privileged place and that the Vate’s poetry inevitably has reflections and influences on the figurative production of the time, just as it is known that classicism and modernity are intertwined in the work of Umberto Mastroianni, who passionately lives the Futurist lesson, particularly that of Umberto Boccioni, but who manages to evolve into new and original languages by being the first to bring abstractionism into Italian sculpture and overcoming the bitter sentence issued by Arturo Martini in 1945, “dead language sculpture.” It is no coincidence that alongside Mastroianni’s sculptures, an exceptional presence in the exhibition has been chosen to display one of the key works by the prematurely deceased Futurist artist: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a bronze casting taken from the cast of an important specimen of the sculpture, cast in turn using Boccioni’s 1913 plaster. To Boccioni, who had already polemicized the naïve forms of his time, searching with visionary force for movement as “latent energy in matter,” Mastroianni reconnects, as Calvesi has observed, “but freeing himself entirely from the residues, however programmatic, of Futurist dynamism and gaining other territories for his imagination of genetic and creative ’chaos.’”

Alongside d’Annunzio’s poems (such as “La donna del Mare,” “Notturnino” “Alba d’estate” or “Tristezza”) are also the verses of Salvatore Quasimodo accompanying the works on display; and the affinities of the themes around man, the pain of war, and the relationship with modern industrialization and the machines of the future are evident. Mastroianni’s Fatal Fall, a large sculpture from 1989, renews its extraordinary expressive power through verses from “Alle fronde dei salici,” which the Modica poet published in 1946:

"And how could we sing
With a foreign foot above our hearts,
Among the dead abandoned in the squares
On the hard grass of ice, to the wailing
Of lambs of the children, to the black scream
Of the mother who went to meet her son
Crucified on the telegraph pole?
From the willow fronds, by vow,
Even our harps were hung,
They swayed faintly in the sad wind."

While the eternal “And it is immediately evening” reminds us of the pain of loneliness to which modern man is destined, the same pain that the great sculptor protagonist of the exhibition brings to life in the lacerating material jumble of 1988’s Wound. In 1958 Mastroianni won the Grand International Prize for Sculpture at the 19th Venice Art Biennale, and the following year Quasimodo received the Nobel Prize “for his lyrical poetics, which with ardent classicism expresses the tragic experiences of life in our times.” A classicism that connotes the artistic path of another of the greatest sculptors of the Italian twentieth century, Francesco Messina, a friend of Quasimodo since his first frequentation of Italian artistic and intellectual circles in the 1920s, who together with Boccioni is the other “illustrious guest” of this tribute to Umberto Mastroianni at the Vittoriale and of the intense dialogue between the bronze work and poetry, inspired by the figure of the creator of this unique place. By Messina, who never abandoned figuration, a unicum related to the figure of the horse, among his favorite subjects, is displayed in the exhibition: the original sketch - jealously preserved by the artist, until shortly before his death, in his summer residence in Gardone - of Prima Quadriga (Quadriga with a long tail), from 1941, a majestic sculptural group that the Catanese artist had designed for the elevation of the Palazzo dei Congressi at EUR, which was never realized because of the war.

Quasimodo would write of Umberto Mastroianni, on the occasion of the volume edited together under the double signature Quasimodo/Mastroianni in the 1950s: “In the Lazio sculptor the negative and positive moments of idealism are already fused at the beginning; it is not a question for him of proceeding in the exclamation, emphatic, rhetorical, or in the dehumanized metal of the machine to resolve the romantic-classical binomial. Of classical in Mastroianni there is the belief in the formation of matter by the intervention of the spirit. Of Romantic, the identical measure of ”storm“ that affirms mind as emotion, man as soul, at the stage of creation.”

Whether artists, like Mastroianni, are capable of capturing the autonomously vital and free sense of form, or whether, like Messina, they remain faithful to the face and the body, what Jean Cocteau reserved for the latter’s work applies: “Art is a still vibration.” An expression that defines the world of Italian sculpture delivered to us by a poet, once again highlighting the indissoluble link between art and words.

Umberto Mastroianni was born in Fontana Liri, in the province of Frosinone, on September 21, 1910. After studying at the Academy of San Marcello in Rome, he moved with his family to Turin, continuing his training under the guidance of master Guerrisi. His early works have a Futurist imprint; in particular, he will be influenced by the works of Boccioni, which Mastroianni tinges, however, with Neo-Cubism. The artist would be the founder in 1947 of the Turin Prize and, in the course of his life, would receive important awards such as the International Grand Prize for Sculpture (Venice Biennale 1958) and the Tokyo Imperial Prize (1989). A world-renowned artist, Umberto Mastroianni died Feb. 25, 1998, in his house-museum in Marino, Rome, leaving numerous masterpieces to posterity.

At Vittoriale degli Italiani, Mastroianni's sculptures dialogue with D'Annunzio and Quasimodo

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