Quinto Martini Biography
The son of farmers, he was self-taught and began his first artistic experiences as a sculptor and painter. In the spring of 1926 he presented himself to Ardengo Soffici at his house in Poggio a Caiano, near Seano, to show him some of his works. The master recognizes the talents of the young man who still has no artistic training, and becomes his intellectual mentor and patron. He taught him artistic techniques and care in drawing, also opening his own library where Martini saw reproductions of Cézanne, Rousseau and Picasso for the first time. This meeting changes Quinto Martini's life, and opens him up to the knowledge of contemporary European but also Italian art by artists such as Armando Spadini and Giorgio Morandi. In Prato, the city closest to his native town, he joined a group of workers, intellectuals and artists from the city formed by spontaneous aggregation around 1925. Among the participants in the group were Oscar Gallo, Leonetto Tintori, Gino Brogi, Arrigo Del Rigo, almost all of whom trained at the "Leonardo" School of Arts and Crafts in Prato, and who also gravitate around Ardengo Soffici and the magazine "Il Selvaggio". Already in February 1927, Soffici introduced Quinto Martini to the public in the first exhibition of the "Il Selvaggio" gallery, where some paintings by Soffici were exhibited alongside the works of Mino Maccari, Carlo Carrà, Ottone Rosai, Giorgio Morandi, Nicola Galante and Soffici himself. of the young Martini. This was his entry into Florentine cultural and artistic life. Relevant for his education are the years 1928-29, when he was in military service in Turin. In the Savoy city he frequented Felice Casorati, Cesare Pavese and the Group of Six Painters, interpreters of an anti-fascist culture that looked to the great lesson of the French painting of Cézanne, Degas and Manet. In these same years, Quinto Martini also met Carlo Levi with whom he formed a friendship destined to strengthen over time. Having returned to Florence, also thanks to his association with Soffici, Quinto Martini continued to create paintings but at the same time concentrated his interest on sculpture, an art with which he earned the favor of critics. The 30s and 40s will be decisive for the sculptor Martini, who shapes simple and "pure" materials, typical of the rural area where he was born, once populated by the Etruscans, and it is precisely from the Etruscan coroplastic that Quinto Martini takes inspiration. Terracotta, for example, is a material with an ancestral flavor for Martini who, as a child, modeled mud to create animal figures, without knowing that these were the first expressive forms of his artistic inspiration.
