Vittorio De Sica Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Vittorio De Sica (1901 - 1974) was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a bourgeois family. His father, Umberto De Sica, a bank employee with a penchant for entertainment, encouraged his son to pursue a theatrical career until he made a name for himself as a protagonist in Italian films, becoming very popular among female audiences. Read the full biography

Vittorio De Sica (1901 - 1974) was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a bourgeois family. His father, Umberto De Sica, a bank employee with a penchant for entertainment, encouraged his son to pursue a theatrical career until he made a name for himself as a protagonist in Italian films, becoming very popular among female audiences. During the Second World War, De Sica devoted himself to directing. His first four films were routine light productions in the tradition of Italian cinema of the time. But his fifth, "Children Are Watching Us," was a mature, insightful and deeply human work. The film marked the beginning of De Sica's collaboration with the author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, a creative relationship that would give the world two of the most significant films of the Italian neorealist movement, “Sciuscià” and “Ladri Di Biciclette”. With no money available to produce his films, De Sica began using real locations and non-professional actors to explore the relationship between working-class and lower-class characters in an indifferent and often hostile social and political environment. The result was raw, searing storytelling that not only exposed the truth about the harsh conditions inflicted on poor Italians, but also represented a radical break with cinematic convention. In 1948, "Sciuscià" received a Special Academy Award. The film was the impetus for the creation of an Oscar for best foreign language film. Two years later, De Sica would again win a Special Academy Award for “Bicycle Thieves,” a work widely accepted as one of the greatest films of all time. De Sica's subsequent collaborations with Zavattini will be "Miracolo a Milano" (1950) and “Umberto D” (1952). They were followed by successes such as "Matrimonio all'italiana" and "Ieri, Oggi e Oggi", both in 1964. At the end of the fifties he devoted himself almost exclusively to acting: "Pane amore e dreams" (1954) by Comencini but also "General Della Rovere" by Rossellini (1959). Vittorio De Sica died in 1974.