Ernesto Biondi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ernesto Biondi, Italian sculptor, born January 30, 1855 in Marolo, died Rome, 1917.

Biondi was a student of Girolamo Masini at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.

Almost since its inception 19th and early 20th Century Italian sculpture has been derided and dismissed outside Italy. Lorado Taft the preeminent American sculpture critic of his day as well as a respected sculptor wrote in 1917,

Most of us think of modern Italian sculpture as hopeless beyond redemption. We recall the plastic jokes, the brazen indecencies, the chiseled vulgarities . . . . . . . . we shudder at memories of the Campo Santa of Genoa and of recent monuments all over Italy, and we dismiss the subject.

Taft then goes on to discuss Biodi and his work, Saturnalia 1899.

Biondi's Saturnalia epitomized cruelly. but not unjustly, the trend of contemporary sculpture in Italy, with all its misplaced effort and its incredible, if not to say fiendish, dexterity. . . . . . . This disgustingly facile performance seemed to this writer like a kind of 'wake' over the corpse of a once noble national art which once produced the Augustus and later the Saint George and the Moses; which has long been dead but which men refuse to bury.

Taft was not a fan of Biondi's work. A recent reappraisal of this work , Biondi's and his contemporaries is currently under way- tending to look at the sculpture of this era in a more favorable light than that which Taft shed on it.

[edit] Selected Works

Fountain of the Puttos, Montelanico, Italy
Saturnalia 1899
The Fountain Biondi, Cisterna, Italy
Monument to the Italian Risorgimento's Heroes, Piazza della Libertà , Frosinone, Italy 1910

[edit] References

Taft, Lorado, Modern Tendencies in Sculpture: The Scammon Lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1917, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois 1928