Vitaliano De Angelis (Florence 1916 - Livorno 2002)
Vitaliano De Angelis studied at the Florence Istituto Statale d’Arte under sculptor Bruno Innocenti. In 1945 he exhibited at the Florence Mostra Nazionale di Belle Arti and from the following year onwards he took part in the Arte d’Oggi group of young artists in search of new expressive styles in the changed political and civil post war world. In common with other artistically trained artists at the Porta Romana Istituto d’Arte from the group, De Angelis opted for a modern sculptural style on a figurative continuum rather than the ‘deformations’ which would take some members of the group in an abstract direction. In 1947 he took part in Arte d’Oggi’s first exhibition and exhibited at Pisa’s Palazzo della Giornata. The following year he was once again in Florence at the Italo-French exhibition sponsored by Arte d’Oggi together with Burtin, Dayez, Pignon, Berti, Cassinari, Consagra, Farulli, Grazzini, Guttuso, Lardera, Nativi, and Vedova, an exhibition whose intention, as its catalogue expressed, was to represent “the liveliest work being produced today in Italy and elsewhere”. In 1948 he was invited to the Rome Quadriennial and in 1952 took part in the competition to make the doors for Siena cathedral.
Teacher in Volterra and then at Lucca’s Istituto Statale d’Arte, De Angelis made frequent study trips to Paris where he experimented with graphics in the 1970s alongside his sculpture work. His solo and collective exhibitions in Italy and abroad were frequent: in 1951 at the International Sculpture Competition, The Unknown Political Prisoner, Florence-London, Bologna’s Sacred Art Biennial and Artisti Italiani a New York in 1956, the Prato International Graphics Exhibition in 1959 and Pisa in 1964. In 1965 and 1966 he was at Padua’s International Bronze Exhibition, in 1969 at the Madrid International Art and Sport Biennial and the next year at Barcelona’s Graphic Art Biennial. He also took part and won a prize at the Florence Mostre del Fiorino in 1959, 1962, 1964 and 1969. In the 1970s his participation at the National Art and Sport Exhibition in 1974 and the Accademici delle Arti del Disegno exhibition in 1976 in Florence were worthy of note. Having lived in Livorno for many years he worked with various architects including Savioli, Michelucci and Gamberini on sculptural elements in architecture. His is Livorno’s monument to the civilian victims of war and other work of his is to be found in galleries and collections such as Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe in the Uffizi, Villa Pacchiani in Santa Croce sull’Arno and the Livorno Museo Civico di Livorno.
This patinated concrete head reflects all the freshness of the final period of a sculptor who was then in his eighties. In this work too with its elaborate but summary hair style which introduces the rhythm of mass in a shared interplay of locks, De Angelis testifies to the coherence of a seven decade long expressive commitment to the figurative tradition.
Pupil of Bruno Innocenti’s at the Porta Romana Istituto d’Arte the then young sculptor was able to ponder the Andreotti lesson on the essential nature of plasticity and the dynamic element to form under his young teacher. These were lessons he never forgot and his in-depth study of them resulted in bold formal solutions overflowing into those ‘Mannerist contortions’ registered by Marchiori in his 1968 Subacqueo and 1969 Subacquea bronzes and in the two Giudittas immediately preceding them.
But the rest of the work of this sculptor, a fertile exponent of femininity, tends to a dynamic conquest of the space in which he located balanced and moving forms by means of the movements of the female body fleeting in their centrifugal dynamism or free standing in bold barycentres. Slender figures such as the 1976 Ballerina, the 1989 Salomè or the 1970 Nudo accosciato which show all De Angelis’s harmonious research into bodies in movements. This former athlete tried and ‘perfected’ “the portrayal of the female nude with a grace which achieves that canon of athletic beauty which constitutes a new type of reality in contrast to classical models”, as Marchiori wrote.
In his faces De Angelis sought his subject’s metaphysical dimension. His female heads, sculpted in the materials he loved best from pietra serena and sandstone to Guamo stone, terracotta to wood, concrete to bronze - and this was true in his graphics too - reflect a cerebral dimension which was timeless or more specifically related to an age which he felt reflected the ‘age of the soul’. This is true of the 1970 Scavo di una Testa di ragazza or the 1974 Testa di ragazza negra and continued with this Giovanna. This is work respectively completed in sandstone, bronze and concrete sharing both a certain inwardness and a sophisticated painterly sense of surface which in turn expresses this inwardness. It is a painterliness which is visible in the straightforward choice of materials, such as the by no means simple-to-use sandstone, or ably obtained by means of patination as in plaster, bronze or concrete of which this work constitutes a splendid example.
mm 500x250x250