DOI Heft:
No. 217 (April, 1911)
DOI Artikel:Macfarlane, Cecil: An italian sculptor: Leonardo Bistolfi
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20972#0202
Leonardo Bistolfi
AN ITALIAN SCULPTOR : LEO-
NARDO BISTOLFI. By CECIL
MACFARLANE.
No living sculptor in Italy to-day holds
a higher place in the estimation of his fellow
countrymen than the Piedmontese sculptor,
Leonardo Bistolfi —■ le sculpteur de l'idee
moderne," to give him the most fitting of the
many names his critics have conferred upon
him, and one of the most complex and fascin-
ating personalities in the contemporary world
of art.
A profound thinker, a poet, a clever prose
writer, an impassioned musician, a brilliant
draughtsman, and with probably as great a
capacity for painting as for sculpture ; it is
difficult to come to the end of his versatility,
for he might have excelled in a dozen other
things.
The thirty laborious 'years separating his
latest work, The Sacrifice—a splendidly con-
ceived heroic group which will be placed on
the memorial to Victor Emanuele in Rome—
from The Bathers, The Peasants and The
Lovers—his three earliest efforts, present an
interesting study in artistic development.
From these early groups, expressive of the
humblest realities of everyday life, he has risen
by successive stages to the heights of idealism.
The intensity of expression which characterised
his early works and to which every other con-
sideration was subordinate, has become tempered
with a maturer quality of technique, and his
later productions show unerring mastery of hand
and eye, ever greater simplicity and clearness
of expression, and a constant aim towards that
classical perfection of form which is the truest
aim of plastic art.
The art of Bistolfi is before everything
intensely individual. His works are the
spontaneous realisations of an innate wealth of
imagination and poetry longing for some tan-
gible form of expression ; the result of perfect
harmony between his conception of some high
ideal or deep emotion and its interpretation.
He has an instinctive genius for design and
decorative beauty, an exquisite sense of rhythm
and harmony, and his productions teem with the
thought and human sympathy of a profoundly
LA BEAUTE DE LA MORT BY LEONARDO BISTOLFI
180
AN ITALIAN SCULPTOR : LEO-
NARDO BISTOLFI. By CECIL
MACFARLANE.
No living sculptor in Italy to-day holds
a higher place in the estimation of his fellow
countrymen than the Piedmontese sculptor,
Leonardo Bistolfi —■ le sculpteur de l'idee
moderne," to give him the most fitting of the
many names his critics have conferred upon
him, and one of the most complex and fascin-
ating personalities in the contemporary world
of art.
A profound thinker, a poet, a clever prose
writer, an impassioned musician, a brilliant
draughtsman, and with probably as great a
capacity for painting as for sculpture ; it is
difficult to come to the end of his versatility,
for he might have excelled in a dozen other
things.
The thirty laborious 'years separating his
latest work, The Sacrifice—a splendidly con-
ceived heroic group which will be placed on
the memorial to Victor Emanuele in Rome—
from The Bathers, The Peasants and The
Lovers—his three earliest efforts, present an
interesting study in artistic development.
From these early groups, expressive of the
humblest realities of everyday life, he has risen
by successive stages to the heights of idealism.
The intensity of expression which characterised
his early works and to which every other con-
sideration was subordinate, has become tempered
with a maturer quality of technique, and his
later productions show unerring mastery of hand
and eye, ever greater simplicity and clearness
of expression, and a constant aim towards that
classical perfection of form which is the truest
aim of plastic art.
The art of Bistolfi is before everything
intensely individual. His works are the
spontaneous realisations of an innate wealth of
imagination and poetry longing for some tan-
gible form of expression ; the result of perfect
harmony between his conception of some high
ideal or deep emotion and its interpretation.
He has an instinctive genius for design and
decorative beauty, an exquisite sense of rhythm
and harmony, and his productions teem with the
thought and human sympathy of a profoundly
LA BEAUTE DE LA MORT BY LEONARDO BISTOLFI
180