Arturo Martini spent his life trying to make sculpture modern and ended it declaring the art dead. In between he produced some of the most memorable Italian statues of the interwar years, in bronze and, above all, in terracotta — a material he lifted from the craft shelf back onto the monument. Cultural Heritage Online keeps the museums and buildings where his work stands; this is the life behind them.
Treviso, Venice, Paris
Martini was born in Treviso on 11 August 1889. He came to art late and from below, through an evening drawing school in his home town before moving on to the Venice Academy. A trip to Munich in 1909 showed him the Secession and Symbolism; a stay in Paris in 1912, with the painter Gino Rossi, put him in front of Cubism and the avant-garde, which he showed at the Salon d’automne. He absorbed all of it and then, characteristically, turned away.
The return to order
His real direction announced itself after the First World War. His first solo exhibition, in Milan in 1920, was introduced by the painter Carlo Carrà, and Martini joined the circle of Valori plastici, the review that called Italian artists back to tradition, to the archaic and the «return to order». Against the fractures of Cubism he set solid, legible figures that looked back to Etruscan and early Italian sculpture — modern in feeling, ancient in form.
Terracotta
In the early 1930s Martini did something few sculptors dared: he built monuments in fired clay. Using the industrial kilns of the Ilva works at Vado Ligure, with the engineer Polibio Fusconi, he produced terracotta figures at a scale the material was not supposed to allow. The gamble paid off. At the first Quadriennale di Roma, in 1931, his refractory-clay works took the first prize, and terracotta — long dismissed as a poor relation of marble and bronze — became his signature.
Public commissions
The 1930s brought him into the great public projects of the regime. He carved the relief of La Giustizia corporativa for Marcello Piacentini’s new Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan (1937), placed the bronze Minerva before the rectorate of the new Sapienza campus in Rome, and made the seated monument to the historian Livy for Gio Ponti’s Palazzo Liviano in Padua (1941–42). These are Fascist-era commissions, and Martini took them; they are also among the most assured public sculptures Italy produced in those years.
«Sculpture, a dead language»
Martini taught as well as carved — a professor at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts from 1942, and its director from 1944. Yet his final statement was a renunciation. In 1945 he published La scultura lingua morta, «sculpture, a dead language», a short, bitter manifesto arguing that the art to which he had given his life had exhausted its power to speak to the modern world. He died in Milan on 22 March 1947, still one of the most influential Italian sculptors of his generation.
In the archive
Follow Arturo Martini across Cultural Heritage Online — the museums and buildings that hold his work, and the anniversaries we mark:
- Museo Luigi Bailo, Treviso — his home city’s museum, with the largest collection of his sculpture, including La Pisana.
- Palazzo Liviano, Padua — Gio Ponti’s university building, home to Martini’s monument to Livy.
- Palazzo di Giustizia, Milan — where his 1937 relief La Giustizia corporativa is set into the walls.
- Città Universitaria, Rome — the Sapienza campus, where his bronze Minerva stands before the rectorate.
- Cà Pesaro, Venice — the international gallery of modern art, which holds works by Martini.
- The Tito Livio statue at Palazzo Liviano — one of his commissions, in depth.
- 11 August 1889 — the birth of Arturo Martini, in the CHO anniversary calendar.
- 22 March 1947 — the death of Arturo Martini.
