“Draft:Marcello Guasti”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Marcello Guasti was born on November 17, 1924, in Florence Italy. During his childhood, a couple things shaped him to be the artist that he is today. First, he grew up with his mother in their bakery. Guasti lost his father early on in life, which meant it was even more important for Guasti's mother's encouragement to spend time with his uncle. Second, his uncle was a carpenter who also drew and painted. They were not the wealthiest family, but they managed; this environment educated Guasti as an artist, but also as a person from Tuscany. It was in his uncle’s workshop that he made his first xylographs.

Not only did Guasti's mother and uncle play a large part in his development as an artist, but his other relatives did as well. His cousin encouraged many of his other relatives to enroll Marcello Guasti in a graphic art school after he graduated from elementary school. The school, Florence art institute, was a place for Guasti to grow and make connections with his teachers like Pietro Parigi and Francesco Chiapelli.

In the 1940s, when he was creating his first xylographs Guasti was inspired by nature and by objects. These pieces were realistic but not necessarily naturalistic. During this time Guasti was more comfortable making xylographs than drawing or painting. In this period Guasti received many awards. For example, in 1946 he won a scholarship that allowed him to take a course at Florence art Institute. In 1947, a turning point for Guasti he won the Mansueto Fenini award. In 1948 the seven members of the admission jury of the XXIV Biennale of Venice accepted two of Guasti’s xylographs for an international exhibition. During this time Guasti was also currently serving in the military near Rome. As a result, he became acquainted with ancient art.

In the 1950s Guasti became interested in another aspect of his Tuscan heritage. Guasti’s attention turned to Etruscan paintings, which can be seen in his Study of an Etruscan Painting (1950). Moreover, he began looking for something more than black and white xylographs. As a result, during the 1950s, Guasti ventured into the field of painting. In his essay “Marcello Guasti: Modern Classicality Between Nature, Geometry, and the Absolute,” Giorgio Di Genova observe “the 1950s were the years of the elaboration of the necessary ‘distances’ between language and reality.” With this change, Guasti held his first one-man exhibit at the Galleria La Strozzina in Florence, where he displayed his xylographs. The 1950s were a time of change, but also a time for masterpieces like the wooden sculpture, Renaiolo drying himself, of a renaiolo or man who worked in the Arno river. This statue came after a group of bronze works strongly influenced by Egyptian sculptures.

The 1960s was another time for a change: Guasti completely abandoned the representation of figures. Then at the age of forty, Guasti produced a monument sculpture, Monument to Three Carabinieri (see above). At the beginning of the 1980s, Guasti wrote in his journal about how his modernity is nourished by antiquity. Guasti’s reflection reveals how antiquity art like Etruscan influences and shapes his modern day sculptures. Many of Guasti’s works of art involve nature and specifically the elements. This theme can be seen in the titles of the works, which have naturalistic allusions. Guasti says himself that, “I wanted to draw smoke, then one day I saw water flow.” An example of this can be seen in Guasti’s Four Elements (Quatto elementi) statue. At the turn of the century, Guasti was asked to create a statue for China in Peking. The statue was based on five elements, which were earth, water, fire, wood, and metal. In this work of art, he combined in order to create. Despite the fact that Guasti is getting older and is 94 years old (in 2018), his approach to art is still progressing.

The Monument to Three Carabinieri is a monument placed in Fiesole , Italy to commemorate and honor the sacrifice of three Carabinieri (National Gendarmerie of Italy ) who were killed by Nazis in Fiesole on August 12, 1944. Their tragic and heroic story began the day before, the very day when Florence was liberated from Germany occupying troops. The three Carabinieri, Alberto La Rocca, Vittorio Marandola and Fulvio Sbarretti, together with their commanding officer, Francesco Naclerio, received orders to disguise themselves and escape from Fiesole, in order to assist in the liberation of Florence. Unfortunately, the roads were blocked, and as a result soldiers had to hide in the Roman ruins in Fiesole. The next day, when the Germans discovered that the Carabinieri barracks were empty, the commanding officer threatened to kill the ten civilian hostages that the Germans had previously taken captive. When informed of this situation, the four Carabinieri decided to turn themselves in. Though Naclerio was forced to return to service, the other three solider were brutally interrogated and then shot to death against the wall of Hotel Aurora. For their sacrifice, the three received the Medal of Honor for Military Service.

In 1964, the City of Fiesole decided to honor the memory of the Three Carabinieri by commissioning a major monument. Giovanni Michelucci, one of the major Italian architects of the twentieth century , who then lived on Fiesole, was responsible for adapting the Park of Remembrance (Parco della Rimembranza), built in the 1920s to honor the local soldiers who died in World War I, in order to host the new monument. For this, Michelucci created a new terrace with a beautiful vista of Florence and the Arno valley. Michelucci also organized the competition for the commission. Four Tuscan artists were invited to submit projects: Vitaliano De Angelis, Marcello Guasti, Mino Trafeli, and Iorio Vivarelli. Guasti (see below), a sculptor, painter, and engraver born in Florence in 1964, was awarded the opportunity realize a large bronze sculpture (five meters high.) He faced two main problems when designing this work. On the one hand, he needed to find a way to honor the Three Carabinieri, and remind viewers of their heroism; on the other, working in harmony with Michelucci, Guasti had to create a work in relation to its physical location in the Park. Guasti’s solution was to create a statue with a dynamic and aggressive shape. The two prongs of the statue stretch out like giant claws; in the center is a flame-like element, a reference to the symbol of the Carabineri. The surface of the statue is jagged and pointed. Guasti himself wrote about the statue, “I developed the research that I had been carrying out in my studio. My research was based on the vitalization, through materiality, of structures-surfaces that were articulated in space. This vitalization was reproduced in a great flame, a symbol of liberty, that rips open a large claw-like tentacle on which the light falls, emphasizing its dramatic tension.”

The Monument to the Three Carabinieri will be the focus of an exhibition organized by the City of Fiesole, in the Archeological Museum of Fiesole (February 17-September 30, 2019)

Texts on statue and artist based on entries written by Ashlyn Brooks Buffum (Syracuse Florence, undergraduate intern, Fall 2018)

References

1. ^As quoted by Artemisia Viscoli, “Biografia,” in Marcello Guasti: tra natura e geometria, 1940-2004, ed. Giorgio Di Genova, Francesco Gurrieri e Marco Fagioli (Bologna: Bora, 2005), p. 333 (Italian), 339 (English translation, here slightly adapted). See (in Italian) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Guasti