Among the most important architectural features considered as sculptures and developed between 1950 and 1951 in Italy there is the bronze gate by Mirko Basaldella at the Mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine, a Memorial Cemetery and National Monument that remembers the mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners carried out in Rome in March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for an attack against German soldiers.
This piece marked an important inversion in trends for what regarded the history of Italian sculpture as the gate was a conglomerate of intricate curving lines interweaving to evoke a series of concepts. Charged with tension, the lines evoked the tragedy of the war, the trajectory of the bullets, the victims' fear and the executioners' violence.
There is a choreography of lines and woven signs in this design, interrupted by empty spaces that pierce the dense rhythm of desperation formed by the lines, shattering their darkness to let us see the light.
This is an extremely dynamic work of art and the main principle behind it was also applied to Basaldella's jewelry pieces. Some of them were part of an auction that took place last week at Sotheby's and that in a way marked Basaldella's 110th birth anniversary.
Born in 1910 in Udine, Basaldella studied art in Venice, Florence and Monza, exhibiting for the first time in his home town in 1928, with his two brothers Afro, a painter, and Dino, a sculptor.
He moved to Rome in the '30s and in 1934 he exhibited in Rome bronze sculptures inspired by the works of his mentor Arturo Martini that already showed a very mature technique.
In the mid-'30s Basaldella represented the Roman School at the Venice Biennale and took part in the II Quadriennale in Rome, exhibiting a series of bronzes made with the hollow wax technique. Around the same time he started making jewels that were originally intended for his wife Serena Cagli, sister of the painter and friend Corrado.
In the meantime, his sculptures began to evolve and the artist started exploring spaces and dark and light areas in more innovative and experimental ways.
His new works exhibited between December 1939 and 1945 showed Basaldella had been influenced by other artists, including Donatello, Pollaiolo (in the bas-reliefs made with the "stiacciato" technique), Hellenistic sculptures, Michelangelo's works and Aztec mosaic sculpture.
In the mid-to-late '40s Basaldella went through a post-Cubist phase and around the same time Mario Masenza expressed his interest in Basaldella's jewellery. Masenza owned a jewellery shop located in via del Corso, Rome, and he was very open to experimental pieces created in collaboration with painters and sculptors from the early 1900s. These jewels, characterised by gold and coral, precious gems and refined chromatic combination were made with "Masenza gold 64", also known as green gold, a distinctive mix of silver and gold with a shade that called to mind the gold used by the ancient Etruscans and Romans.
At first Basaldella wasn't convinced about this collaboration, but then he developed designs for Masenza, and the artist also exhibited a gold brooch at the Triennale in Milan in 1948.
In the meantime, Basaldella's sculptures evolved and mutated and intertwined motifs and spaces started prevailing. The interwoven motifs on the bronze gate of the Fosse Ardeatine became Basaldella's trademark.
In the 1950s Basaldella travelled to Syria and Jordan and later on he created pieces inspired by Pre-Columbian America and the East, revolving around the theme of the idol and the monster or representing rhythms and arabesques.
Appointed director of the design workshop of Harvard University, Massachusetts, in 1957 (he died in Cambridge,Massachusetts, in 1969), he made monumental sculptures for private and public collections, while taking part in group shows in Italy.
During the '60s Basaldella painted more, but also created key cycles of sculptures and worked with different techniques, including wood, cast bronze and styrofoam, combining technological and recycled materials, industrial wrecks, and objects of common use. Basaldella had a talent for creating small pieces and monumental works of art as well, but he was largely forgotten in Italy for a long time and rediscovered only in more recent years when the Fondazione Prada bought in 2017 his statue "Sacerdote" (1967).
Sotheby's auction was another way to rediscover his work: there were intriguing pieces on sale, from his amethyst and rose quartz demi-parure to his turquoise and ruby demi-parure with open work star motifs. One bracelet (sale price: £8,190) and a coral ring (sale price: £4,410) were made with an abstract open work design that looked very similar to the one of the Fosse Ardeatine gate. The most expensive piece was a diamond demi-parure (sale price: £ 20,160) depicting scenes of abstract figurines, followed by a synthetic ruby necklace (sale price: £9,450) with panels embossed with various symbols (that called to mind the unintelligible hieroglyphics and geometrical signs and symbols on the walls of Arnaldo Pomodoro's labyrinth). Their sale prices proved that jewels designed by artists can genuinely be considered as fine (and wearable) works of art.
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