Pietro Manzoni Scurati Biography
Pietro Scurati Manzoni (1927 - ) was born in Milan in 1927, and began to paint early under the guidance of his mother, the painter Erminia Mariani, from whom he borrowed his lively sense of colour, then following art courses at the Brera Art School painting by Domenico Cantatore and sculpture by Lorenzo Pepe, the two masters who shaped his artistic personality. Multifaceted intellectual figure, after the art high school in Brera, he graduated in architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan with Luigi Crema, where he was assistant professor of history of Roman architecture from '57 to '70, then moving on to teach, as a freelance lecturer in the stylistic and construction characteristics of monuments, first at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Catholic University of Milan and then at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Pescara and that of Engineering of the University of Brescia. At the same time, in 1966, he became superintendent of monuments for the province of Sondrio and, after the 1976 earthquake, superintendent and responsible for the reconstruction of the monuments of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. And he will remain at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, as an official and central inspector, until his retirement in 1992. To this intense professional activity, Scurati Manzoni has always accompanied a constant artistic activity as a painter, sculptor and author of stained glass windows, following the post-impressionist direction of his two masters from the Brera years. In 1963 he created the large obelisk for the Shrine of Monte S. Martino in Valcuvia, in memory of the first partisan battle in Italy, which was followed by several other religious-themed sculptures (Via Crucis, the Pietà, the Flagellation). Many of his stained glass windows also have religious subjects - which Scurati Manzoni created entirely himself - such as those on the Mysteries of the Rosary (1966) in the ancient church of Carmine in Pavia, the Crucifix of 1983 and the Deposition from the Cross (1984), all of quite expressionistic. During the 1980s, they were accompanied by a discrete group of stained glass windows depicting landscape subjects. Beyond the different creative techniques, in fact, what gives unity to his artistic work is the artist's inner poetic world and the human message of ideas and feelings that he manages to convey with his work.
