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Giacomo ManzuItalian sculptor, laureate of the International Lenin Prize "For strengthening peace between nations".
Date of Birth: 22.12.1908
Country:  Italy |
Content:
Biography of Giacomo Manzù
Giacomo Manzù was an Italian sculptor and the laureate of the International Lenin Prize. Born in Bergamo in 1908, he had a strong desire to eat, drink, and become a sculptor from a young age. Growing up in a family of twelve children, Manzù began his artistic pursuits by molding and drawing even before attending school. However, at the age of eleven, he was forced to leave elementary school due to the large size of his family. He became an apprentice to a gilder and later worked as an assistant to a stucco sculptor. In his free time, Manzù continued to draw, sculpt, paint, and attend evening classes in applied arts.
In 1927, Manzù left Bergamo and spent eighteen months in the army. During his service in Verona, he had the opportunity to visit the local Chiericati Academy, where he studied plaster casts of ancient sculptures with great enthusiasm. The reliefs of the San Zeno Maggiore church in Verona particularly captivated his imagination, and relief sculpture would become his preferred form of expression for the rest of his life.
Manzù's artistic career began in Milan. After completing his military service and a short trip to Paris in 1928, he moved to Milan in 1929. His visit to Paris did not yield significant results as he was unable to find work or see the sculptures of Rodin and other contemporary artists. Instead, he experienced hunger, police questioning, and deportation back to his homeland.
In Milan, Manzù started working in oppressive poverty without any substantial support. With the assistance of architect Mucio Manzù, he received his first independent commission to decorate a chapel at a Catholic university. In 1930, Manzù participated in an exhibition of Milanese artists at the Milione Gallery, where he caught the attention of critics. His early works were characterized by sharp and somewhat ironic observance ("The Goalkeeper," 1931) and occasionally refined stylization ("Annunciation").
In 1932, Manzù achieved true success and gained recognition. A monograph dedicated to him was even published in Milan. However, during this period, he experienced a crisis and disappointment in the works that brought him popularity. Under the pretext of being unable to live in the large and noisy Milan, he returned to Bergamo. In 1934, Manzù went to Rome to study ancient Greek sculpture in museums. The procession of cardinals during a religious ceremony at St. Peter's Cathedral left a lasting impression on him and inspired his first drawings on the theme of "Cardinals." From then until the 1960s, this theme became one of his constant subjects, developed both in socio-historical and visual-plastic terms.
In 1938, he created "David," which challenged the Italian "neoclassicism" of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship. Manzù despised the dark and empty gigantism of that era. His "David" depicted a skinny boy crouching to lift a stone for his slingshot. Despite his appearance, the sculpture exuded a determined and dramatic expression in his head turned towards the approaching enemy. The dramatic contradictions of contemporary reality and the daunting trials of World War II found resonance in Manzù's series of reliefs depicting the "Crucifixion." During the war and post-war years, the sculptor became a member of the Resistance, joining a group of anti-fascist artists. Through Renato Guttuso, another member of the group, he established connections with the underground Communist Party of Italy. The artists saw art as a means of liberation.
The post-war years marked a period of creative maturity for Manzù as a portraitist. His portraits gained increasing psychological acuity. Notable examples include the lifelike and psychologically acute portrait of Alphonsina Pastorio (1944) and "Portrait of a Girl" (1946). It is worth mentioning the series of portraits of Inge, who became Manzù's companion and wife. In the late 1940s, Manzù turned to several thematic cycles. One of them was "Dancers," where he created a musical suite through the language of sculpture, revealing the poetry of life and the joy of the human body.
According to Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, "Cardinals" played a crucial role in Manzù's aesthetic biography, connecting different stages of his creative personality. The geometric figures in these sculptures solve the same spatial task as the "Doors" - they possess the same striking light, curves, hypotenuses, and parallels that Manzù consistently used in his search for volume.
In the early 1960s, Manzù underwent a conceptual shift in his "Cardinal" series. The 1960 sculpture introduced a bold idea of a smooth ellipse, which was fully realized in the 1964 "Cardinal." Moving away from the curved lines that characterized the 1960 sculpture and the light cell in which the prelates of the Ecumenical Council were depicted, Manzù arrived at the verticality of the 1964 sculpture.
One of the significant achievements in Manzù's career was his monumental work on the "Doors of Death" for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. This project allowed him to transcend the boundaries of small-scale studio art, but it consumed nearly eighteen years of his creative life. As the "Doors of Death" explore the theme of death as an inevitable aspect of life, Manzù also addresses the theme of death in the contemporary world. The doors feature reliefs inspired by biblical stories and the lives of saints, portraying scenes such as the "Deposition from the Cross" and the "Assumption of Mary."
Contrasting the tragic lyricism of the "Doors of Death," Manzù later created works celebrating the joys of life. He returned to one of sculpture's eternal and beloved themes - the beautiful nude body. A notable example is his work "Lovers" (1966), where intertwining bodies express the passionate longing in the most natural and highest sense, as a movement of self-assertion through generations.
One of Manzù's last major works was the gates of St. Lawrence Cathedral in Rotterdam, dedicated to the theme of war and peace, completed in 1969.
