Bidspirit Auktion | GIULIO BARGELLINI (Firenze 1875-Roma 1936)

GIULIO BARGELLINI (Firenze 1875-Roma 1936) - Study for mosaic frieze, 1931 ca.. GIULIO BARGELLINI (Firenze 1875-Roma 1936) Study for mosaic frieze 1931 ca. Mixed media on paper applied on canvas 148 x 320 cm Preparatory study for the 1931 mosaic made for a Jesi villa. Expertise by Prof. Francesco Parisi: ”In the late 1920s, Jesi-born architect and engineer Quadrio Pirani, whose work was aimed at building housing for the Cooperative Institute for State Employees' Housing, set himself as a landmark in the evolution of the architectural language of the twentieth century, leaving to Rome one of the few pages of international standing. He restored and updated the 18th-century villa La Meridiana in Jesi, adapting it for family housing, as he has already been done with his brother's house in the nearby Falconara Marittima. Pirani was linked, by a decades-long friendship, with the artist Giulio Bargellini, so much so that when the latter died it was the engineer himself who recovered and preserved much of the material left in the studio, including the substantial epistolary, which is still preserved by the heirs. Pirani's daughter, Beatrice, also married the illustrator Ottorino Mancioli, a frequent visitor to Bargellini's atelier himself, so much so that a work by Bargellini retouched by Mancioli himself was present at the heirs. Pirani was linked by a decades-long friendship with the artist Giulio Bargellini; when the latter died it was the engineer himself who kept much of the material left in the studio, including the substantial epistolary, which is still preserved by his heirs. Pirani's daughter, Beatrice, also married the illustrator Ottorino Mancioli, a frequent visitor to Bargellini's atelier, so much so that the heirs had a work by Bargellini retouched by Mancioli himself.The bond with Pirani and the close relationship of trust is further evidenced by a letter, attributable to the same years as the decoration of Villa La Meridiana, in which Bargellini invites his friend to look to the four compositions he was preparing for the Sacro Cuore church in Monte Mario, made between 1930 and 1934 (G. Monti, A. Rocchetti, L'opera di Quadrio Pirani dai documenti del suo archivio, in “Architettura Archivi” 1982, no. 2, pp. 61-86).At the time of the commission for Pirani, Bargellini was coming from a long experience in large-scale decoration, as evidenced by the cycles for the headquarters of the Bank of Italy (1924), the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni (1927) and the Ministry of Grace and Justice (1929), as well as the numerous private commissions that had effectively distanced him from easel production and consequently from participation in the major national biennial and quadrennial exhibitions, in which he had nonetheless taken part (Esposizione Internazionale, Rome 1911; Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti, Rome 1904 and 1912; Venice Biennale 1905, 1924 and 1926). By 1931 Bargellini had achieved a well-defined language, at times synthetic, but with a definite character identification in the types of the rather realistic faces and a 15th-century-inspired decorative imprint that would culminate in the works for the Chapel of San Giovanni Gualberto in Santa Prassede in Rome (1933). The nature of the works executed between 1910 and 1930, for which a constant dialogue with architecture was inherent, reflects how much Bargellini's friendships in the artistic sphere were often reserved precisely for the architects with whom he established a relationship of trustful collaboration: his friendships, for example, with: Armando Brasini, who imposed him as decorator for the Italian Pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris and for the Monument to the Fallen and Victory in Tripoli (the building, later destroyed, was built between 1925 and 1929), but also with Ernesto Leschiutta (Santa Prassede, Rome), Antonio Barluzzi (Basilica of Gethsemane, Jerusalem), Marcello Piacentini, Florestano Di Fausto and Ugo Giovannozzi. For the decoration of Villa La Meridiana, the dialogue between Pirani and Bargellini is evident from the latter's participation in both the design of the architectural frame, underlying the mosaic, and the sundial. The decorative stylistic features can be found in some of the artist's earlier works, as can be seen from the choice of the numbering characters, which are sufficiently approachable to those already used in the decorative apparatus of Villa Targioni Peragallo in Calenzano, created almost thirty years earlier, which, thanks to some allusions to occultism of which the artist was a careful scholar at the time, testifies to one of the rare examples of Symbolist decoration found in Italy (see Francesco Parisi, Giulio Bargellini, Klimtian reflections in the painting of an Italian Symbolist between Florence and Rome, in Klimt e l'arte italiana, edited by Beatrice Avanzi, exhibition catalog, Mart, Rovereto, March-June 2023, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2023, pp.