Arturo Martini’s influence on Italian and international sculpture of the 20th century is still to be explored because his vast production is characterised by a confident and immediate plasticity, an extreme delight in invention that crosses all the techniques of being a sculptor, from stone to bronze, from terracotta to ceramics. From a stylised primitivism he moves on to a research that tends towards a simplification of volumes that are articulated in tight structures of great plastic intensity.
His style, with its cultured originality, is inspired by the archaic and primordial forms of the Etruscans, the expressive synthesis of Romanesque art and the inspiration of form of the great Baroque season.
The upcoming Milan auction of Modern and Contemporary Art on 21 December will feature a 1934 bronze depicting ‘Faith and Light’ (lot 17, estimate 35,000 – 45. 000), part of a series of sketches for the monument in honour of Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, Duke of Aosta, who died in 1931, which the artist produced as studies for this important public commission that was later awarded to Publio Morbiducci by the jury chaired by Alberto Savinio, which envisaged a horizontal development with the colossal statue of the Duke in the centre and its two lateral plinths, at the top of the steps, two large allegorical groups representing “Strength and Heroes” and precisely “Faith and Light”.