Pericle Fazzini
Italian,
(1913–1987)
Pericle Fazzini made his first sculptures in the studio of his father, a wood-carver. In 1929, he moved to Rome, where he took drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti. From 1937 to 1952 he served as an instructor at the Museo Artistico Industriale in Rome. During this period he explored different materials in his sculpture, including clay and bronze, won the Premio dell’Accademia d’Italia (in 1942), and had his first solo exhibition and retrospective. He continued to teach through most of the 1950s, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and then at the Accademia di Brera in Milan.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s he began to focus more attention on portraiture subtly infused with a sense of humanity. The artist returned to a more Baroque sensibility in the period between 1946 and 1955 with works in which he combined figures from real life and fantasy with a sense of dynamic visual rhythm. Fazzini is best known for his later, more monumental works, including Monument to the Resistance(Monumento alla Resistenza, 1956) in Ancona and Resurrection (La resurrezione, 1972–77), commissioned by the Vatican. Fazzini died in Rome on December 4, 1987.
Source: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection