Romano Romanelli
Romano's works occupy an important place in the Avant-Garde movement and form part of the ongoing artistic legacy of the Romanelli dynasty.
In 2012, his daughters Costanza and Ilaria donated their collection of around two thousand drawings by their father to the Florentine Galleria d’Arte Moderna housed in the Palazzo Pitti.
As a cadet and junior officer in the Italian Navy, he made five voyages, visiting the Mediterranean, North America, and Europe including the Azores and Madeira.
In 1906 Romano started work on his bronze monument, Hercules strangling with the Nemean lion, a piece was presented at the Biennale at Venice in 1910, then also at the Universal Exhibition in Rome in 1911.
During his time in the navy, one particular trip would take him to the Greek remains of the Valle dei Tempi in Agrigento, Sicily, which he would draw upon as inspiration in his later work.
While Romano would never part ways with this Classical grounding, he would go on to achieve a commendable feat, that of creating sculpture that was on the one hand paying homage to Antiquity and on the other toying with newfound concepts of Artistic Modernity.
Romano entered Paris when the French Avant-Garde movement was in prominence, and therefore became submersed in an environment in which contemporary visions of art were blooming.
Dennis would later along with the sculptor Paul Maximilien Landowski nominate Romano to become a member of the prestigious "Institut de France" and the "Académie des Beaux-Arts".
Romano kept company with many prominent figures of the artistic community as well as being exposed to great works of art, including Gauguin’s exotic Tahitian beauties.
He writes that Romano "began to strip his art of every psychological, dynamic, and colourist influence that he had unconsciously derived from Rodin – all his efforts from now on were directed towards making his art more severe, and more religious, more architectural and absolute – in a word, more 'Italian' ".The validity of these words lies in the abundance of Romano's works linked to Italian Nationalism and Classicism, but his work continued to display traces of his pre-war influences.
Pugile in Combattimento – The Fighting Boxer (1926) bought by Minister Augusto Turati for the Foro Italico stadium in Rome and shown at the "Mostra del Novecento" in 1929 bears witness to Romano's style of the post war period.
The socks, the livery, the gloves and the concentration on the facial expression and the action stance of the athlete all reveal a style which leans towards the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Following on from this theme is the Il Pugile Ferito – Wounded Boxer (1929–1931), inspired by the beautiful Hellenistic bronze ll Pugilatore in Riposo housed at the National Museum, Rome (Palazzo Massimo alle Terme), is distinctive of Romano's style of this period.
In 1932 through a number of newspaper editorials, published in La Nazione, Florence's main daily, he criticized the poorly thought-out project by the architect Mazzoni for the new Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station[8] A constructive debate resulted in the final choice of the project designed by Gruppo Toscano composed of Giovanni Michelucci, Pier Niccolò Berardi, Italo Gamberini, Nello Baroni, Leonardo Lusanna and sponsored by the architect Marcello Piacentini.
It was produced in white marble for the Palazzo di Giustizia, the law court in Milan, where it is still today and the original plaster is preserved in the Galleria Romanelli in Florence.
The theme is inspired by Dante’s Canto X of Purgatory, in which the Roman emperor Trajan administers justice on behalf of the widowed woman kneeling in front of him.
The son of an Albanian prince he was kidnapped by the Ottoman court in 1423, becoming the pupil of Sultan Murad II and forced to engage in military duties on behalf of his empire.
Lo Scultore – The Sculptor (1926–1930) is similar to The Pugile in its display of physical force, had been purchased during the second Mostra del Novecento by the Minister Turati for the Stadio Nazionale di Roma.
One of Romano's last works was from a competition for a large commission which he won at the end of the decade for the Monument to the Italians Fallen in Africa (1938–39).
Following the signing of Pact of Steel between the Kingdom of Italy and Germany on May 22, 1939, Romano became publicly extremely critical of the regime, having advised it strongly against this alliance.
He was then pursued by the regime which issued an arrest warrant for him and he went into hiding, first in the Tuscan countryside, on one of his estates where he was eventually denounced by one of his own farmers, but managed to escape and subsequently hid in the Vatican until the end of the war.
In the meantime, his wife Dorothea hid and gave refuge in a secret space below the roof of their family home in Florence to a number of Jews and other personalities pursued by the regime, such as the German artist and Florentine resident but anti-Nazi, Baroness Gisele von Stockhausen, for her knowledge of the area and drawing skills necessary for the drawing of military maps.
A friendly member of the Italian Military Police, the Carabinieri, would warn Dorothea the day before searches were planned in the area, so that she could let the refugees run into hiding in other caches outside the home.
Before the outbreak of World War I, he was commissioned by Gabriele D'Annunzio to create a limited series of four medals "Medaglie di Guerra" to honour the valiant .
He additionally sculpted international figures, notably the Duke of Aosta (1932), Chiquita Esteban de Canongo (1922), Princess Aspasia wife of Alexander, King of the Hellenes, Count Paolo Guicciardini (1928) and Mussolini on Horseback (1933) for Addis Ababa.
He was then named an Accademico d’Italia After World War II, Romanelli's workshop was involved in the creation of the historical friezes for the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa.
