Lugano
Arturo Martini (1889 – 1947) was an important Italian sculptor, active between World War I and II.
He attended the school of ceramics in Faenza and then he studied sculpture in Treviso.
In 1909, while he was in Monaco, he was a student of A. Hildebrand and in 1911 he moved to Paris. After World War I, in Rome, Martini was part of the “Valori plastici” group and was a teacher at the School for the artistic industries in Monza.
His vast work is characterized by immediate plasticity, by an extreme joy of invention and by a complete mastery of all the technical processes and mediums such as stone, bronze, terracotta and ceramic.
From his first works, of stylized primitivism he moved on to a search for the simplification of volumes. Which was then articulated in tight and highly intense structures of plastic.
With an admirable sense of style, he was able to draw inspiration from the most diverse historical, archaic, Etruscan, Romanesque, and Baroque forms, without ever losing the originality of the invention and the vitality of the form, very remarkable are also his small ceramic groups, full of narrative spirit and, at the same time, of decorative value.