Training
He was a self-taught artist, born in a farming family and raised among the hills behind Leonardo da Vinci's land. Martini was discovered by the artist Ardengo Soffici 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 valued in traditional Italian art. Quinto Martini was then taught drawing and art techniques, and exposed to art and literature with Soffici as his patron and mentor. In Soffici's library, Quinto Martini studied the French Impressionists and other modern artists: Cézanne, Degas, Picasso and the cubists, as well as Italian artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Armando Spadini, and the futurists.
In Prato, the closest city to his hometown, Quinto Martini joined a group of workers, intellectuals, and artists spontaneously formed in 1925. Among those artists were Oscar Gallo, Leonetto Tintori, Gino Brogi, and Arrigo Del Rigo. Almost all of them studied at the "Leonardo" Art School of Prato, and were inspired by Ardengo Soffici and by the movement "Il Selvaggio".
In February 1927, still under the aegis of Soffici, Martini was invited to participate in the collective exhibition il Selvaggio, together with Mino Maccari, Carlo Carrà, Ottone Rosai, Giorgio Morandi, Achille Lega, Pio Semenghini, Nicola Galante and Evaristo Boncinelli. He later published in the same 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 Soffici, one of the fundamental interlocutors of his life.
After a period of military service in Turin, in the early 1930s he started working on the "Mendicanti" series which he investigated again and again throughout his whole life 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. The sculptures of Quinto Martini were also inspired by the Etruscan style, which was deeply rooted in his area where there are important Etruscan archeological sites.
In 1935 Martini relocated from the Tuscan countryside to Florence, where he died in 1990.
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