Quinto Martini (artist) - Quinto Martini As Sculptor and Mature Artist

Quinto Martini As Sculptor and Mature Artist

Across the 1930s 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 from which Martini had moulded animal figures as a child, playing in the farm yard. 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 his work was appreciated by the important Italian critic Giuseppe Marchiori. The review Domus published an interview with him, and he was the protagonist of some exhibitions in Florence, Milan, and Rome at the "Quadriennale d'arte nazionale". In the same years, the artist will continue publishing drawings and etchings in the cultural reviews il Selvaggio, Frontespizio of the writer and politician Piero Bargellini, and in the art and literature review l'Orto from Bologna.

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. Across the ’50s and '60s, Quinto Martini pubblished some tales and poems for the “Nuovo Corriere” of Firenze, while many more remain still unpublished. In 1974, his second novel Chi ha paura va alla guerra is printed in Catanzaro for the Frama’s Publisher edited by Pasquino Crupi, where Quinto Martini tells the story of a deserter during the First World War.

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 20th-century artistic currents including cubism and futurism.

Quinto Martini paid particular attention to "Portraits" and to "the Rain" theme. The artist exercised portraiture since his first sculpture experiences, portraying relatives, friends, and peasants of his homeland. Many portraits were made in terracotta, plaster cast, bronze of his mother, Ardengo Soffici, his wife Maria Ferri, often shown at important exhibitions. "Portraits" of artists, scholars, intellectuals, were made by Quinto Martini from the end of the Second World War until his death, in a sort of continuous dialogue with them that lasted for decades and at times with repeted portraits across the years. In 1992, two years after the artist's death, 30 of these "Portraits" were exposed in an exhibition hosted at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, to realize a project that the artist imagined in 1984. The disastrous inundation of Florence of 1966 intensified the inspiration of Quinto Martini for "the Rain" theme, expressed through drawings and bas-reliefs, but also through operas in bronze. The poets and intellectuals Mario Luzi, Renzo Federici, Tommaso Paloscia, Carlo Levi, many of whom were subjects of the "Portraits" themselves, wrote about these operas hosted again in Palazzo Strozzi in 1978.

He was a professor of sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence from 1961 across the 1960s and 1970s. 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 symposia, 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 1970s and '80s.

Some of his most notable works were inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, and he himself has been described as "an important fixture in the cultural and artistic life of 20th-century Florence." The artist dedicated to Dante's masterpiece a complete set of lithographs which toured in Rome, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and also in Warsaw and five different cities in the former U.S.S.R. Three books where published on this series of Martini.