Leone Pancaldi Biography
Leone Pancaldi (1915 – 1995) attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in the 1930s, then enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Florence, graduating with Adalberto Libera, a well-known Italian representative of rationalist and modern architecture. He took part in the Second World War where he was taken prisoner by the Germans and interned in various concentration camps: Oberlangen, Sandbostel, Wietzendorf. He made friends with other internees, including artists and intellectuals, including the art critic Luigi Carluccio who portrayed him in a drawing from 1944. Upon returning to Bologna in 1945 he resumed teaching and painting. In that climate of post-war reconstruction he committed himself to planning a series of exhibitions of ancient art organized by the art historian Cesare Gnudi. The organization of the exhibitions and the teamwork with Andrea Emiliani and Cesare Gnudi himself make him one of the best-known museum architects in Italy. In the following years, the renovation project of the National Art Gallery of Bologna contributed to consolidating its fame and consideration. In 1968 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MOMA, invited Leone Pancaldi and Carlo Scarpa to represent Italian architects in an exhibition dedicated to "Museum Architecture". In the meantime he did not neglect his work as a painter, participating in the Venice Biennials of 1956 and 1964. In the seventies and eighties he was once again involved in the construction of highly prestigious public buildings: the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, inaugurated in 1975, the first headquarters of the Emilia-Romagna Region 1969-1975 located in Viale Silvani in Bologna, the IBM building in Borgo Panigale 1976-1979. Leone Pancaldi continued to work until 1995, the year of his death, leaving around three hundred paintings, many drawings and a rich archive of architectural works.
