Quinto Martini (1908 – 1990) was an Italian artist and writer, born in Seano, Tuscany. He was a self-taught artist, born in a farming family and raised among the hills behind Leonardo da Vinci's land.
It was the contemporary renowned Italian artist Ardengo Soffici who discovered Quinto Martini in 1926, when he went to visit Soffici's workshop in Poggio a Caiano, close to Seano, where the latter retired to paint the nature and traditional Tuscan farmers' world. Looking at the young Martini's first experiments, the maestro Soffici recognised the kind of genuine and intimate traits he was seeking. Quinto Martini was subsequently exposed to art and literature with Soffici as his patron, studying the French impressionists like Degas and Picasso, but also the Italian Giorgio Morandi and Armando Spadini, as well as the cubist and futurist artists.
In February 1927, still under the aegis of Soffici, Martini participated in his first exhibition, "il Selvaggio", together with reputed artists like Mino Maccari, Carlo Carrà, Ottone Rosai, Giorgio Morandi, Achille Lega, Pio Semenghini. He later published in the review il Selvaggio etchings and drawings, entering the Florence artists' and intellectuals' world.
Between 1928 and 1929 Quinto Martini went to Turin for military service, where he moved in bohemian cafés and cultural circles enlivened by a Parisian avant-garde atmosphere. There Martini met Felice Casorati, Cesare Pavese and "The Six Painters" group, who were typical interpreters of an anti-fascist and communist-oriented culture inspired by the French Cézanne and Manet. In Turin the young artist encountered the intellectual Carlo Levi who would be, together with Ardengo Soffici, one of the fundamental interlocutors of his life.
Back in Florence after his military service in Turin, early in the 1930s the artist started working on the "Mendicanti" series which he would investigate again and again throughout his production. Martini's mendicants are painted in a realistic manner, where their poverty is described through poverty of tools, and the figures are symbolically lengthened and bent to the Earth.
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Across the '30s and '40s, the artist's attention shifted progressively to sculpture. He used simple and "poor" terracotta, a material typical of his rural environment which was already common in the Seano area when the Etruscans settled and expressed their culture millenniums before. Terracotta was like the mud Martini moulded to make animal figures at the time he was a child, playing in the farm yard without knowing that those figures were early expressions of art, without even knowing what art was yet. One terracotta sculpture was "la ragazza seanese", which was unveiled at the XIX Biennale di Venezia in 1934. From that moment on, Quinto Martini gained the appreciation of the critics and the public.
From 1935 onward, Quinto Martini was present in all editions of the Quadriennale di Roma until the 1972-73 edition. At the 1939 edition, an entire salon was dedicated to his sculptures alone. In the same year, the artist published some of his etchings in the review "Frontespizio" which was gathering together the most relevant contemporary artists from Ottone Rosai to Giorgio Morandi, from Giacomo Manzù to Fiorenzo Tomea, and also important writers like Mario Luzi and Carlo Bo.
Quinto Martini participated in the XXth Biennale di Venezia edition, where he gained appreciation of the important critic Giuseppe Marchiori. The review "Domus" published an interview with him, and he was the protagonist of some exhibitions in Florence, Milan, and Rome.
The "Mendicanti" series, some of which were displayed at the "Lyceum" in Florence in 1943, were considered to be against the regime warlike propaganda. Quinto Martini was jailed shortly after the exhibition, together with Carlo Levi, in the same prison where his brother had been kept for almost fifteen years. Once released, the artist went into hiding in the Chianti countryside to avoid being captured by the Nazis. In that period he wrote the novel I giorni sono lunghi (The Days Are Long) to render that experience memorable, which was published in 1957 with a preface from Levi himself. Intimate reflections expressed in verses, opened Martini's road to poetry.
With clear inspiration and sound form of expression, the artist animated the "Nuovo Umanesimo" art group with Ugo Capocchini, Emanuele Cavalli, Giovanni Colacicchi, Oscar Gallo, and Onofrio Martinelli in 1947. Their "manifesto" announced their opposition to any concept of abstract art. Late in the 1940s Martini's sculptures won some first prizes at the national level, and early in the 1950s they started to be exposed abroad. Quinto Martini's paintings turned into a mature revision of Ardengo Soffici's style, and experimentation of some of the XXth Century artistic currents including cubism and futurism.
He was a professor of sculpture at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence from 1961 across the 1960s and 1970s.[1] During the same years, the artist continued in his experimentation, developing the "Rain" theme and participating in exhibitions at the national and international level like the International Small Bronze Competition. Some of his small bronzes were exhibited at the "Contemporary Italian Sculptors" exhibition in 1970, which went on world tour (Florence, Budapest, Milan, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Tokyo, Osaka, Hakone, Strasbourg, and locations in Holland.
Quinto Martini lectured in many conferences and symposium, and wrote a number of essays on the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo, Rodin, and others. Personal and anthologizing exhibitions have been widely shown in the '70s and '80s.
Some of his most notable works were inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy,[2] and he himself has been described as "an important fixture in the cultural and artistic life of 20th-century Florence."[3] The artist dedicated to Dante's masterpiece a complete set of lithographs which toured in Rome, at the National Library of Florence, and also in Warsaw and five different cities in the former U.S.S.R. Three books where published on this series of Martini.
Exhibitions on the artist are continuously organized, and books published.
Parco museo Quinto Martini in Seano was dedicated in 1988, while Martini was still alive, and displays 36 of his bronzes in an open air setting.[4]