Antonio Mazzotti Biography
Antonio Mazzotti was born in 1914 in Bologna. He demonstrated a love for drawing from an early age and, with the support of his parents, attended the Liceo Artistico in Bologna, graduating in the summer of 1933. A few months after graduating, he passed the State Exam for teaching art. drawing in middle school schools. He obtained his first teaching position at an institute in Venice, where he remained until the outbreak of the Second World War. He then moved to Bologna to be with his widowed mother. He obtained a position as a drawing teacher at the "San Domenico" middle school, where he met his future wife, Liliana Anna Migliavacca, also an artist and student of Giorgio Morandi's engraving school at the Academy of Fine Arts. During his post-war reconstruction he lent his geometric design skills to important Bolognese architects, first of all Alberto Legnani. It was during this period that he was drawn to painting. He began with self-portraits (circa 1939) and added post-impressionist landscapes and still lifes. From the late 1940s he became interested in post-cubism and studied artists such as Piero della Francesca, the Flemish masters (especially for their vivid color choices), and 19th-century French artists such as Delacroix and Courbet. From 1984 Mazzotti's artistic production slowed down due to the first symptoms of the stroke which caused his death the following year. He died on 8 December 1985, at the Maggiore Hospital in Bologna, two weeks after his seventy-first birthday.
