Livio Benetti Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Livio Benetti (1915 - 1987) was born in Trento in 1915. The son of a Trentino chiseller artisan, he studied at the Industrial Schools of his city where he followed plastic courses and where he graduated as a "blacksmith" presenting an embossed iron plate. Read the full biography

Livio Benetti (1915 - 1987) was born in Trento in 1915. The son of a Trentino chiseller artisan, he studied at the Industrial Schools of his city where he followed plastic courses and where he graduated as a "blacksmith" presenting an embossed iron plate. Thanks to a scholarship, he then attended the Art School of Florence where he studied painting and frescoes and continued his specialization courses in sculpture first at the Academy of Florence and then at the Academy of Venice. It is here that he definitively matures his awareness of the fundamental importance of color and becomes passionate, at the same time, about the study of Impressionism and contemporary French artistic culture. In 1937 he won the professorship of drawing and began teaching at the Teachers' Institute of Sondrio. His social Catholicism leads him to sacrifice the spontaneous avant-garde artistic experimentalism for the social communicability of the work, commensurate with the provincial social and cultural environment in which he lives. Furthermore, his idea on the civil function of art and of the artist was also connected to this principle and, starting from the 1950s, he would be involved in the creation of numerous monuments and works of art of a public nature, from mosaics of Piazza Garibaldi in Sondrio (1956) to the Monument to the Resistance in Piazza Campello (1968), to the Monument to the Fallen of Sondalo (1973), to the bronze group on the family outside the hospital of Tirano (1978), thanks to a fortunate and uninterrupted public and private clients to which his figure as a politician was not alien.