Studio: international art (56.1912)

Studio-Talk

made their first steps in art through a series of
successful provincial pensionates and prizes, it was
the open competitions for this monument which
gave them their present place before the eyes of the
world. Curiously enough, in the two final com-
peting designs for the relief Dazzi achieved his
greatest success where Zanelli was less successful,
namely, hfihis grand central seated figure of Rome.

Zanelli himself had followed a very similar treat-
ment of the subject—a treatment which was
perhaps to some extent inevitable from the subject
and spacing—but had made his central figure up-
right and more deliberately archaic—or rather I
might say archaistic—in type, a guardian goddess
of the Empire City based on the design of the
Athena Parthenos of Pheidias,'or perhaps, as has
been also suggested, of the Minerva Promachos of
the Naples collection. It is, however, in his pro-
cessional groups that he has achieved his greatest
success. How nobly conceived are these draped
maidens who guide the great oxen beneath the
mounted trumpeters! Or, again, the
four, one of whom lifts her tiny babe
against her breast, might be the splendid
sisters of the Caryatides or the Ariadne
of the Vatican. The relief is, in fact,

Hellenic in its dignity and purity of
plastic inspiration; but in these pro-
cessional figures there is a note which
is far apart from the Hellenic serenity
—a calm sadness, as if these figures,
who realise so well the glory of human
life, knew too its limitations and their
journey’s ending.

A few brief notes on Zanelli’s earlier
career may be here not out of place.
Born in 1879 at S. Felice di Scovolo,
near Lake Garda, he made his first
studies at the industrial school of Salo;
but the call of his life-work took early
hold, and before long we find him busied
in the quarries of Botticino. At Brescia
he won the purse offered triennially by
that city to art students within the pro-
vince, and was thereby enabled to pursue
his studies at Florence, and later at
Rome. Success, however, did not
come to him at once; years of un-
certain and tentative efforts followed,
and it was only with his Donna alia
Canestra that he first found his most
individual expression and his place in

public favour; whence he has advanced rapidly, to
the moment when in December last, the Royal
Commission for the monument declared him victor
in this great national competition for the reliefs of
“ The Nation’s Altar.” S. B.

MOSCOW.—After the brilliant success
which the “ Mir Isskousstva ” (The
World of Art) scored with their first
exhibition last year, their second exhi-
bition recently held here proved somewhat disap-
pointing, a result which has a natural explanation
in the absence of certain artists whose places it is
very difficult to fill, such as Somoff, Golovine,
Bakst, Roehrich, and a few others, but was also in
part occasioned by the exercise of rather too much
indulgence on the part of the jury. They admitted
a whole series of casual exhibitors whose works
often fall far below the general level of the “ Mir
Isskousstva,” and whose presence in this exhibition
was a disturbing element. But on the other hand
the exhibition unexpectedly gained attractive force

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