Pericle Fazzini – Sculptor of the wind
Pericle Fazzini was an Italian sculptor and painter (Grottammare 1913 – Rome 1987)
Who was Pericle Fazzini?
Pericle Fazzini was a major international sculptor and a key figure in the Roman School. After more than thirty years away, his work returns to Rome with a retrospective dedicated to him.
Origins de Pericle Fazzini
Pericle Fazzini started his training in the workshop of his father, who was a skilled carpenter.
He moved to Rome when he was 17.
With the prize he won at the Rome Quadrennial, he took a studio on Via Margutta where he worked for the rest of his life.
Exhibitions and awards
The poet Mario Rivosecchi, from his hometown, first introduced him to the milieu of artists in Rome. He was part of the Roman School. He met the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti.
After World War II, he returned to Rome and worked on Il ragazzo con i gabbiani (The Boy with the Seagulls).
Based on this work, the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti dubbed him the sculptor of the wind.
In 1952, he held a solo show at the Alexander Jolas Gallery in New York.
Then, in 1954, he won the first prize for sculpture with a solo exhibition at Venice Biennale.
In 1955, he was made the chair of sculpture at the Academy of Florence. Four years later, he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
Pericle Fazzini – Sculptor of the wind at the Bilotti Museum
Marking the 110-year anniversary of the artist’s birth, after more than thirty years of absence, Rome is dedicating an exhibition to Pericle Fazzini, covering his entire career.
It includes about a hundred works with woods, bronzes, plaster and graphic works until the Resurrection.
Wood was his first love, in the footsteps and teachings of his carpenter father.
The bronzes chosen are among his most iconic works.
The sketch of the Resurrection.
First, the portraits, including the polychrome wooden portrait of his wife Anita Buy, a plaster portrait of Sibilla Aleramo, a beautiful wooden sculpture Giovane che declama (Young Man who Declares), the Profeta (“The Prophet”) in pear wood and Il ragazzo con i gabbiani (“The Boy with the Seagulls,”) in polychrome wood.
“La conchiglia”, on canvas-backed paper.
His self-portrait from 1947, colored crayons on paper
“I want to sculpt the sublime, the union between a terrible and beautiful thing. A tremendous explosion, a whirlwind of violence and energy. The power of the resurrection of Christ” Pericle Fazzini
Resurrection
His enormous Resurrection in bronze, commissioned by Pope Paul VI is without question the work of contemporary art that has been seen most often on television, as it is behind the Pope every Wednesday morning during the general audience in the Nervi Audience Hall.
Fazzini worked on the piece from 1970 to 1975, using the Church of San Lorenzo in Piscibus as a workshop. It is like a ray of sunshine that radiates 180 degrees and the towering figure of the resurrected Jesus rising over chaos.
The piece is twenty meters long, seven meters high and three meters deep, an emblem of movement and stability, reality and surrealism, and the human and divine life.
It was unveiled in 1977.
“My sculpture has the Adriatic on it,” Pericle Fazzini wrote.
And indeed, though he lived in Rome, he went back to his native Grottammare on the Adriatic often.
His entire oeuvre was guided by their emotional intensity in expressing the deepest feelings of humanity.
His works are in major private collections and major museums around the world.
“The true art is God, and our soul is the artwork.”