Roberto Caligiani Biography
Alberto Caligiani (1894 – 1973) was an Italian painter, engraver and writer. At the age of four he moved with his family to Pistoia, and cultivated painting as a self-taught, having attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence for only one year, 1910. In Pistoia he became involved with the painters Nannini and Innocenti and came into contact with Viani and Rosai. Through Viani he approached woodcuts, exhibited in 1913 at the Black and White Exhibition in Pistoia and collaborated on the new La Spezia magazine L'Eroica. He took part in the III International Exhibition of the Roman Secession in 1915 and left for the front in the same year. After the war, after a brief experience in the United States, he moved between Pistoia and Florence, taking part in the artistic debate in the two cities. From the mid-1920s he approached the twentieth-century group, but with an interpretation, typical of the Pistoia school, of the themes of the movement and referring to the simple rural life of the Tuscan countryside. He is among the exhibiting artists at the I and II Mostra del Novecento Italiano (in Milan in 1926 and 1929), at the 1931 and 1935), where he was awarded the gold medal. In the same years he moved permanently to Florence, dedicating himself not only to painting but also to teaching.
