Milano: “Leonardo Bistolfi, visionary symbolist”, the new exhibition at Galleria Silva

Milano: “Leonardo Bistolfi, visionary symbolist”, the new exhibition at Galleria Silva.

From 20 October Galleria Silva will welcome a selection of the most fascinating and visionary works by one of the major protagonists of European symbolism: Leonardo Bistolfi (Casale Monferrato, 15 March 1859 – La Loggia, 3 September 1933). The exhibition will be a reconnaissance within the fascinating and visionary expressive universe of the Piedmontese sculptor, whose highly personal and highly imaginative plastic language had many stylistic repercussions both in Europe and overseas, going so far as to influence the contemporary monumental statuary of Central and South America ( in fact, already at the time the critics spoke of "Bistolfism" and "Bistolfian" sculptors).

Trained first at the Brera Academy in Milano and then at the Albertina in Turin, under the guidance of Odoardo Tabacchi, after a realist and scapigliata-inspired debut, Bistolfi opened his aesthetic-cultural horizons to literary symbolism of Franco-Flemish origin and to the demands of European decadentism. He identified himself in a particular way with the concept of "Beauty worker", following an ideological and spiritual line which was, essentially, that traced by John Ruskin and William Morris.

The Galleria Silva exhibition is dedicated to the Symbolist period, the most representative and influential of his intense career: an ideal journey that goes from a plaster version of the Alpe's head to the Monument to Giovanni Segantini in Saint-Moritz ( Beauty liberated from Matter, 1899-1906), perhaps the most iconic sculpture of Bistolfi's entire production, leading to the marble Will or Industry (ca. 1925), an extraordinary example from the historical collection of an illustrious figure, linked to Bistolfi by an ancient bond of friendship, and never left it until today. The Will represents to the highest degree the partial mutation of the author's symbolist modules, which occurred after the Great War and during the first years of the twenty-year littorio period, whereby the turgidity of the forms and the monumentality of the allegorical figure betray a different, more charged and sensuous, in a certain sense more "twentieth century", revealing a visibly accentuated sumptuousness and opulence.

The itinerary is completed by a small example of the Brayda Cross (1901), very rare to find in terracotta; the plaque for the Bibliographical Society of Turin (1905-1906), precious plaster full of Pre-Raphaelite echoes, dedicated to his friend the sculptor, painter and set designer Lodovico Pogliaghi; the bronze detail of the female figure on the right of the plaque for the Cassa di Risparmio Milano (1906), one of Bistolfi's figurative texts most involved with Liberty, in the wake of the 1902 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin, for which the artist had designed a famous poster; the highly inspired funeral plaque for André Gladès (ca. 1906-1908), male pseudonym of the Swiss writer Nancy-Marie Vuille, who died at the age of thirty-nine in Geneva in January 1906; the plaster bas-relief of the Culla for the ossuary monument La Patria (1906), commemorating the 1706 battle in Madonna di Campagna; the chalk of the reverse of the model of the medal for the “Florio” sports competitions in Palermo (1907); and, again in plaster, the head of the figure of Death from the Abegg funerary monument (1912-1913), located in the Zurich cemetery. Finally, we should not forget the bronze plaque for Giovanni Faldella and Leonardo Bistolfi (1913), knights of the civil order of Savoy, a significant "Bistolfian" work by Edoardo Rubino from Turin.

The exhibition will feature a catalog edited by Armando Audoli.