Today it is Liberation Day in Italy, a public holiday in which the country celebrates the end of Nazi-fascism during the Second World War. To mark it let's look at the life and works of an anti-fascist sculptor, painter, ceramist and poet - Leoncillo Leonardi, better known simply as Leoncillo.
Born in Spoleto in 1915, Leoncillo first developed a passion for sculpting as a teenager, when he took refuge in the family's attic in a self-imposed isolation after he failed his classes in school for his misbehaviour, and his brother gave him some clay to comfort him. Leoncillo then went on to study art in Perugia and Rome.
In the late '30s he started working with Ceramiche Rometti and made his first large statues. Invited by Gio Ponti to display his work at the Triennale in Milan in 1940, he presented a series of ceramic pieces, among them busts of the four seasons, a hermaphrodite and mugs and accessories for coffee and tea.
During the war he joined the partisans of the Brigata Garibaldi "Francesco Innamorati" in Foligno and his political commitment reflected also in his art that started combining realism with abstractism: in 1944 he created the sculpture "Madre romana uccisa dai tedeschi" (A mother from Rome killed by the Germans) and ten years later he made "Bombardamento notturno" (Night Bombing, representing a mother protecting her child from bombs) and "La Partigiana" (The Partisan Woman).
This polychrome ceramic statue in a neo-Cubist style was characterised by asymmetrical volumes and was commissioned to Leoncillo for the Castello Gardens in Venice. His Partisan woman is a fighter dynamically walking, wearing big boots and carrying a rifle on her shoulder. Her eyes and mouth are wide open as if she were out of breath, maybe climbing a mountain, or running through a wood, trying to escape from the enemy. Yet she also retains all her fragility in the material chosen for the sculpture – majolica.
The original statue was characterised by bold and bright colours and had a red scarf and, since that detail may have been seen as a reference to the Communist Party, Leoncillo was requested to make another statue that had a brownish neckerchief.
The second work was mounted on a minimalist plinth by Carlo Scarpa and installed in the Castello Gardens in Venice 1957, but it was sadly destroyed by a neofascist bomb in 1961 (the original version of the statue can still be admired at the Galleria internazionale d'arte moderna Ca' Pesaro in Venice).
Leoncillo took part in various exhibitions in Venice between 1948 and 1968 and also worked on applied art objects such as his glazed polychrome terracotta elements for a balustrade, then he combined terracotta and porcelain stoneware and experimented with abstract sculptures in white, black and red ceramic, at times characterised by holes, cuts and slashes.
The latter represented negative spaces and the possibility of reaching out to another dimension, but they also called to mind the wounds inflicted on the body and the mind by the war.
We have seen these holes and wounds also in a recent collection, showcased in Milan before the Coronavirus outbreak disrupted the life of the city and of the entire country.
Creative Director Francesco Risso moved from Alice in Wonderland in his A/W 20 collection for Marni, that featured A-line dresses and coats made with a variety of collaged pieces of leftover textiles, leather, calico used for dress toiles and soprarizzo (literally "over the curl") velvet handwoven at Tessitura Bevilacqua in Venice on looms from the 1800s that originated from the ones designed by Leonardo da Vinci (in some cases the effect wasn't particularly new and called to mind other experiments in fabric recycling including Margiela's). Patches of discarded fabrics were also employed to make bags and sporty shoes.
The dresses, at times evoking mosaics made with pieces of broken glass and ceramics, were pierced by holes and slashes enriched with metal frames cast from clay by Risso and his team.
These holes, but also some of the colour combinations in this collection called to mind Leoncillo's works and the contrast between the metal elements and the soft velvets can also remind of that extraordinary juxtaposition in "La partigiana" between the role and dynamic pose of the empowered woman portrayed and her vulnerability.
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