Studio: international art (89.1925)

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FLORENCE

DESIGN FOR DECORATION IN
THE BANCA D'lTALIA, ROME
BY ANTONIO MARAINI

FLORENCE.—In giving my readers this
month some illustrations of the work of
Antonio Maraini, mostly taken from the
delightful little " Mostra Individuale"
which he gave in this last Venice Biennial,
I wish to add a few words on a sculptor
whose work is of special interest. Maraini's
plastic art is essentially decorative, and,
though he may occasionally have treated
the round, his preference is certainly for
relief, for the subject presented from one
side only : more than this his work in
bas-relief or high relief, without being
architectural is so in the sense that it
always contains the constructive element.

It has been said of him by one critic that,
while he has remained, through his
decorative sensibility and his culture,
immune from Futurism, he is a "passatista"
(delightful word !) capable of foreseeing
motives and tendencies of the future. His
experiments in material bear out this
criticism. I remember last year, when
visiting him in his delightful home without
Porta S. Niccolo at Florence, admiring
some work in that " pietra serena"
(" Intimitd " is in this stone) which had
been used five centuries before by Donat-
ello in his Annunciation of Santa Croce,
t as well as in terra-cotta and " creta

verniciata " and walnut-wood, beside the
more conventional marble and bronze. To
take some examples from the Venice
" Mostra " the charming portrait study of
Pia and Virginia de Filippi (1924) was in
marble, the Leda and Adam and Eve (1923)
„„, „„ , in bronze, the Caritas in " terra-cotta

charcoal drawing . , . ' . . _, . , . ,,

by antonio maraini robbiana (1923), Ricordo in creta

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