Salvatore Saponaro Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Salvatore Saponaro (San Cesario di Lecce, 30 March 1888 – Bizzozero, 1970) was an Italian sculptor.

His first training took place in Lecce, where in 1906 he completed his apprenticeship as a sculptor and ceramist with Augusto Lucrezio. Three years later, having won a scholarship from the Provincial Administration of Lecce, he moved to Rome to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, also assiduously visiting museums, and made his debut at the Roman Spring Exhibition of 1915 with a series of plaques in bronze which received the applause of Angelo Zanelli and Giulio Aristide Sartorio. Read the full biography

Salvatore Saponaro Biography

Salvatore Saponaro (San Cesario di Lecce, 30 March 1888 – Bizzozero, 1970) was an Italian sculptor.

His first training took place in Lecce, where in 1906 he completed his apprenticeship as a sculptor and ceramist with Augusto Lucrezio. Three years later, having won a scholarship from the Provincial Administration of Lecce, he moved to Rome to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, also assiduously visiting museums, and made his debut at the Roman Spring Exhibition of 1915 with a series of plaques in bronze which received the applause of Angelo Zanelli and Giulio Aristide Sartorio. At the end of the First World War, in which he fought and also suffered a harsh period of imprisonment in Germany, he went briefly to Florence and then to Milan, where he settled in 1921 and started his artistic activity. As a sculptor-decorator he collaborated with the major architects of the time including Giovanni Muzio and Tommaso Buzzi, whose portraits he also executed, exhibiting his works at some of the main exhibitions of the time (Venice Biennale of 1926; International Exhibition of Decorative Arts of Monza in 1927) and at the various Exhibitions of Sacred Art in Milan. His official production includes some decorative interventions in public buildings in Milan and Belluno, the statues for the Fountain of the Tritons in Milan (1928) and the creation of funerary works and stained glass windows. At the end of the 1920s he chose the quiet of the Varese area as a place of retirement and decentralization of his activity, living in Bizzozero in the villa called "la novella" which he designed and built himself, where he definitively retired until his death in 1970.