Young Man (Seated-Young Man)

If Italian art found new vitality in the inter-war period by reviewing artistic examples from the past, in terms of sculpture, the most original and convincing results were certainly those achieved by Arturo Martini. His reflections on ancient statues, nurtured in those years by repeated visits to the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome, found an important testing ground in the I Quadriennale in Rome, where “Sitting Boy” was also exhibited, together with a handful of other works of remarkable quality. In retrospect, the supreme recognition for sculpture given him in that exhibition almost seems like a foregone conclusion. “Sitting Boy” was sculpted, as with many terracotta works of that period, in Vado Ligure. Here, Polibio Fusconi, a director at Ilva Refrattari, had provided sculptors with the use of a kiln in which they could model and fire in the same place, without having to move large works. After its presentation at the Roman exhibition, we find the work at the IV Mostra Sindacale in Turin, in May 1932, where it was purchased by the Department of Fine Arts. It was then sent to America, in 1939, for the Universal Exhibition in New York, from which it only returned, in poor shape, after the war, in 1947 (“that boy with no arms should never have been sent to America,” commented the artist). The sculpture, depicting a young man, seated but with his gaze and torso projected forward, and his right leg resting on a stone, stands out due to the artist’s respectful attention to the material from which it is made. If there is a linguistic trace that distinguishes all his works, aside from the ever-present archaic Neo-figurative accent, it is the decision to always allow the tactile expressivity of the various materials with which he works to emerge: the fragile coarseness of the clay, the porous hardness of stone or the bristly firmness of wood. Influenced by Martini’s fascination for Roman and Etruscan remains, which he was able to examine during his many visits to the public archaeology collections, the visual references suggested for this work include the “Seated Hermes” in the Archaeological Museum in Naples and the “Auriga” in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.