Mastroianni show reaches 40,000 visitors

(ANSA) - Rome, July 30 - 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.