Giovanni Stradone Biography
Giovanni Stradone (1911 - 1981) Since childhood he has lived and worked in Rome, demonstrating from an early age a great versatility and passion for drawing and later for painting, frequenting the house and studio of the painter Ferruccio Ferrazzi as a teenager until 1927. In the 1930s his pictorial taste was oriented towards the so-called "Roman School" but his expressionist language in the footsteps of Scipione and Mafai later in the 1940s, according to Venturoli, Virgilio Guzzi, Ercole Maselli and Antonello Trombadori, would acquire new and original characteristics in the treatment of chromatic matter. In 1950 Stradone sent a large painting entitled "The Apotheosis of Bartali" to the Venice Biennale, exhibited for the first time at the Gioisi Gallery in Rome in 1948. The work caused a great stir due to the content depicted because it was considered disrespectful even if the Biennale justified its request for its immediate withdrawal from the exhibition by writing that it was necessary to send works that had never been exhibited before. In 1950, at the same time as he abandoned the geometric experience, his first Monograph was published by De Luca with a preface by Giuseppe Dessì and Claudio Claudi. From this moment on, there were numerous exhibitions in which Stradone participated with noteworthy works: in 1954, for example, he presented numerous works at the Venice Biennale such as "l'Idillio" of 1950, "Colosseo e cyclist" of '51, "Morning on the 'Appia" of '53, "Roman Forum and Church of SS Luca and Martina" 1954. With the "Latina Prize" in 1960 and that at the "IV Biennial of Contemporary Italian Engraving" in Venice in '61 and his presence at the retrospective dedicated to the "Roman School from 1930 to 1945", and the VIII Quadrennial in addition to his participation in the "Exhibition of the Renewal of Art in Italy from 1939 to 1943", the renewed interest in Stradone's painting is attested. In 1967 he participated in the exhibition curated by Ragghianti in Florence entitled: “Modern art in Italy from 1915 to 1935” and in 1968 he was present in the exhibition “Mafai, Scipione, Stradone” at the Senior Gallery in Rome. In 1981 he suddenly died.
