Arrigo Minerbi Sculptor. Between Ferrara and the Italian culture of the early twentieth century.

From Saturday, July 8, the cool noble halls of Ferrara’s Castello Estense welcome visitors to the superb exhibition dedicated to Arrigo Minerbi (Ferrara, 1881 - Padua, 1960), a distinguished prince of early 20th-century Italian sculpture and a personal metaphor - if we can put it that way - of the complex vicissitude of a culture with unequivocal Mediterranean roots that had to deal with crises and evasions, theoretical and formal, around two shattering wars but without ever abandoning the search for the absolute that remains fundamentally the structure of every open spirit. With happy centrality, in fact, the title of the event declares “The True Ideal Between Art Nouveau and Classicism.”

The exhibition is a further fruit of this very active season in the ducal city, which is leading a critical renaissance of the highest commitment, on which it has composed an organic and excellent staff of scholars and expert collaborators, and where it has also spread an active network of restorations and recompositions on its incomparable palaces. Synchronized engines of this are the City Council and the “Ferrara Arte Foundation” chaired - we would miss it - by Vittorio Sgarbi.

Why Minerbi? Because he was born and trained in the prodigious city of Este and then enriched by systematic work with numerous experiences at various artistic workshops - Florence, Genoa, Milan - and above all because he stands well within the very rich world of ideality which sees on the literary scene Pascoli and D’Annunzio but also Ungaretti, Saba, Montale, and on the artistic scene sees Fattori, all the Tuscans, Sartorio, Chini, Bistolfi, Wildt, Medardo Rosso, Graziosi, and then Casorati, Campigli, Carrà, Funi, Previati, Sironi and Oppi, with others; preserving in his own background baggage and prosody the fluent genetics of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.

The need to have a confrontation with plastic art in Ferrara today is due precisely to the role that a sculptor-master, even in the lesser propaganda of his mode of operation, powerfully holds. Who is the sculptor? A figurative artist who-unlike the painter-has before him only two closed, and fearsome elements: the pool of motionless clay, and the formless block of marble; both as a challenge, both awaiting a complex technical wisdom, entrusted to the toil and acrimony of the hands, to the excavation of strange tools. The sculptor is an artist who will have to enclose in a solitary still presence every value: ethical, poetic, memorial, sweet or strong, prehensile to the soul and capable of overriding all temporality. He is the man of every “monimentum” where an unalterable instant is reflected, a supersensible will, and even an entire civilization. Arrigo Minerbi has fulfilled that task with sovereign silence in his works, with the perfect possession of form that consecrates every true sculptor.

Seeing the exhibition at the Estense Castle today, rich as it is with an unmissable catalog, provides us with an enrichment that words can define with much difficulty. Let us try to follow it by reasons, choosing certain images within the very rich harvest on display. The happy notice is that certain works by coeval sculptors and paintings by the above-mentioned painters are precisely placed in parallel with Minerbi’s path, so as to give in continuity the cultural panorama of the early twentieth century, rich certainly and always to be reevaluated.

It.

.

The.

.

."

.

.

.

Arrigo Minerbi,

.

.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.