Giacomo Manzu' Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Giacomo Manzù, stage name of Giacomo Manzoni (Bergamo, 22 December 1908 – Rome, 17 January 1991), was an Italian sculptor. Twelfth son of the shoemaker and sacristan Angelo Manzoni and his wife Maria Pesenti, he soon learned to work and carve wood. Read the full biography

Giacomo Manzu' Biography

Giacomo Manzù, stage name of Giacomo Manzoni (Bergamo, 22 December 1908 – Rome, 17 January 1991), was an Italian sculptor. Twelfth son of the shoemaker and sacristan Angelo Manzoni and his wife Maria Pesenti, he soon learned to work and carve wood. He approached art during his military service, carried out in Verona (1927/'28), where he studied the doors of San Zeno and the casts of the "Giambettino Cignaroli" Academy of Fine Arts. In 1929, after a short stay in Paris, Manzù went to live in Milan, where the architect Giovanni Muzio commissioned him to decorate the chapel of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, which was carried out between 1931 and 1932. Again in ' 32 participates in a collective exhibition at the Galleria il Milione. In 1933, he exhibited a series of busts at the Milan Triennale which earned him praise and the following year he held his first important exhibition with the painter Aligi Sassu, with whom he shared the studio, at the "Cometa" gallery in Rome. In 1934 he married Antonia Orena. In 1938 he began the series of Cardinals, the iconographic theme of his entire career. The first seated Cardinal, 65 cm high, was exhibited at the Rome Quadrennial in 1939 together with the David, and subsequently purchased by the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. He will produce more than 300 versions of this theme, different in size, position and materials, among these the seated Cardinal remains the most replicated and famous figure of the series. In 1939 he began producing a series of bronze bas-reliefs (Florentine stiacciato), the Depositions and the Crucifixions for the Christ in our humanity series, in which the sacred theme of the death of Jesus Christ is used to symbolize first the brutality of the fascist regime and then the horrors of war. The exhibition of the works, held in Milan in 1942, was severely criticized by the political and ecclesiastical authorities. Meanwhile, in 1940, Manzù obtained the chair of sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts which he left due to disagreements with the academic authorities on the study program to move to teach sculpture at the Albertina Academy in Turin. He then left the city as the war raged, taking refuge in Clusone. His nude Francesca Blanc won the prize at the Rome Quadrennial in 1943. In that period he began working, together with Alfredo Biagini, on the creation of the Door of Death for St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican (completed in 1964). The Vatican gate, which engaged the artist from 1947 to 1964, became the epicenter of a poetics which, in dialogue with tradition, rejected its more strictly academic aspects. After the war he returned to teach at the Brera Academy until 1954 and then at the Sommerakademie in Salzburg until 1960 where he met Inge Schabel, who would become his life partner and with whom he would have two children, Giulia and Mileto. She and her sister Sonja become the models for all his portraits. Towards the end of the 1950s, the collaboration with the MAF foundry in Milan was born with which he was able to create a greater number of sculptures and therefore expand his creations into monumental forms which were based, in 1956, on the new theme of the Mother with Child; he also created the Door of Love for Salzburg Cathedral (1955-1958). In 1962 he participated, together with the most important international sculptors of the period, in the Sculptures in the City exhibition organized by Giovanni Carandente as part of the V Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, presenting three bronze sculptures: Skater from 1958, Cardinale from 1959 and The Great key of 1959. In 1964 Manzù went to live in a villa near Ardea (Rome), in the locality of Campo del Fico in the hamlet of Fossignano adjacent to the ancient fortress of Ardea, but in the municipality of Aprilia. The town between Ardea and Aprilia has today been renamed Colle Manzù and the municipality of Aprilia has also dedicated its municipal library and conference room to Manzù. He created the Door of Peace and War for the church of Saint Laurens in Rotterdam (1965-1968) and, after about ten years of bas-reliefs, he returned to full-length works, creating female figures in bronze ranging from portraits of his wife to more or less openly erotic like the Artist with the model (relief), the Lovers and the Strip-tease. In 1965 the purchase of the land where the Amici di Manzù Museum will be built in Ardea was completed, at the confluence of two watercourses: Fosso di Sant'Antonio which flows into the Incastro, a legendary watercourse present in the Aeneid and in the history of Rome, mentioned in the Siege of Ardea by Tarquinius the Proud. In 1969 the Amici di Manzù Museum in Ardea was inaugurated. The same year his designer son Pio died. In the late sixties he became a set designer, designing costumes and sets for Igor Fëdorovič Stravinsky (for his 1964 Oedipus Rex), Goffredo Petrassi, Claude Debussy, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. In 1968 Curtis Bill Pepper wrote the book An Artist And the Pope about him; the Pope mentioned in the title is Pope John XXIII, his countryman and personal friend; the book is translated into Italian, German, Spanish and French. Meanwhile, the sculptor's fame reached Japan, where in 1973 a personal exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. His is the Monument to the Partisan located in Bergamo, inaugurated in 1977. Also in Bergamo, numerous of his works are collected in the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. In 1974, (19 November), an "attempted kidnapping of Giulia and Mileto, sons of Giacomo Manzù, took place in the Ardea villa" (Paese Sera). In 1979 Manzù donated his works to the Italian State. In 1989, in New York, his last great creation, a 6 meter high bronze sculpture, was inaugurated in front of the UN headquarters. In 2007 a group of 6 sculptures was exhibited, "en plein air", in Orta S. Giulio, in the province of Novara. Manzù died in 1991, on 17 January.