An Umberto Mastroianni
retrospective at Turin's Diocesan Museum recently surpassed
40,000 visitors, offering the public a look at some 60 works,
many of which are rarely shown.
The Italian sculptor, uncle of film star Marcello
Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita fame, produced works using a wide
range of materials, from bronze to wood, lead to glass, paper to
jute.
Exhibit curator Floriano De Santi, director of the
Mastroianni Archive in Brescia, said the materials that
Mastroianni used had precedents in the work of Romanian sculptor
Constantin Brancusi, as well as Russian painter and architect
Vladimir Tatlin "much more than any other Italian sculptor".
The exhibit is housed in the churchyard of the Turin
Cathedral and inside the cathedral's 15-century bell tower.
The works span the artist's life and include a bas-relief
completed in 1927-28, "Deposition".
That is shown together with the artist's last work, a small
acrylic titled "Death of Death" from 1997, completed just months
before Umberto Mastroianni's own death in February 1998.
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