Giuseppe Grandi Biography
Giuseppe Grandi (Ganna, 17 October 1843 – Ganna, 30 November 1894) was an Italian sculptor. He follows the teachings of Vincenzo Vela at the Accademia Albertina in Turin. In 1866 he won the Canonica competition with a sculpture dedicated to Ulysses, and began working with the realist sculptor Tabacchi in Turin. After the period in Turin, he returned to Milan and joined the group of artists of the Lombard Scapigliatura. Friend of Tranquillo Cremona and Daniele Ranzoni, he took positions of anti-academic renewal with them and shared their common luministic research. Forgetting the neoclassical smoothness and clarity of romantic art, he seeks effects of pictorial luminism in sculpture. Thus he comes to develop his own sculptural modeling, with vibrant and lively ways. One of the first examples is the monument to Cesare Beccaria of 1871. Other notable works in this respect are Lara's Page of 1873 and, above all, Marshal Ney of 1874 in which work reveals itself to be free from any rhetorical romanticism. In 1881 he took part in the public competition announced for the Monument to the Five Days of Milan in Piazza di Porta Vittoria. His sketch will be successful and for thirteen years the artist will work intensely on this which will prove to be his masterpiece; he composes, models, assists at castings. He even went so far as to create a small menagerie of animals to draw living models for the sculptures that make up the work. To represent each of the five days, five girls from working class backgrounds are chosen as models. He died on November 30, 1894, before he could see his work inaugurated.
