Luigi Zuccheri Biography
Luigi Zuccheri (Gemona del Friuli, 13 March 1904 – Venice, 9 March 1974) was an Italian painter and illustrator. Luigi Zuccheri was born in Gemona del Friuli on 13 March 1904. He spent his childhood and adolescence in San Vito al Tagliamento, attending high school in Udine and continuing his literary studies in Venice, which he interrupted in 1923 to dedicate himself to painting. Until 1928 he studied drawing and painting with Alessandro Milesi and Umberto Martina, staying in Venice, Friuli and Florence. The landscapes, some seascapes, the large peasant figures and the scenes of village life, the solitary animals are from these years. In 1929 he moved to Paris, where he lived and studied for a year, also taking an interest in the surrealist movement. Three years later he married Jolanda Ca'Zorzi, sister of Giacomo Noventa, with whom he would have three children, and moved to San Vito al Tagliamento, however staying often, and briefly, in the Venetian palace in Campo Santa Maria Formosa. He still paints landscapes, animals, peasant figures, many female nudes at the toilet. His artistic activity was intense until 1945: he sculpted puppets, painted pictures of "santini", "arcimboldi", still lifes with masks and curtains and books, miniatures and paintings on parchment, while little by little, in his painting , the human figure becomes smaller and smaller, until it disappears. Pushed and encouraged by his wife and friends, he agrees to exhibit his paintings to the public and begins to hold his first exhibitions. In his painting man reappears (denied during the war years) but in an inferior dimension compared to animals and nature, tiny with his tools and his houses. In 1949 he met and became a friend, in Florence, of Giorgio De Chirico, with whom he shared his secrets of "tempera painting" and after 1950 he held two important solo exhibitions at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan and at the Galleria Allard in Paris, but above all participates in the XXV Venice Biennale. However, the years between 1949 and 1959 were intense: travel, exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, artistic knowledge and painting. In addition to drawing and painting, he models his animals and his little men in wax, many of whose subjects are cast in bronze. In 1959 he published Il Bestiario di Zuccheri for De Luca Editore, eight color plates and ten in black and white, with an essay by Alfredo Mezio. Until 1974 he worked intensely in Venice, in Abano, in Noventa di Piave, in San Vito, met friends (De Chirico, Giacomo Noventa, Mario Soldati, Carlo Levi), published for All'insegna del Pesce d'Oro, Del piturar in tempera, six of his original recipes written in Venetian, Italian and English, and then with Amedeo Giacomini a small treatise for Scheiwiller Editore, The Art of bird-hopping with mistletoe, which he illustrated.
