Tue 20 Jan 2004
Pietro Annigoni
Filed in Artists |
Pietro Annigoni was born on the 7th of June 1910 in Milan, where he attended elementary school, high school at the Ginnasio Parini, and then the Calchi-Taeggi College. In Florence he was a student at the College of the Piarist Fathers.
In 1930 Annigoni exhibited his work for the first time in Florence as one of a group of painters. He had his first individual exhibition two years later at the Bellini Gallery in the Palazzo Ferroni.
Annigoni had a great success with his Milan exhibition in 1936. After that he conceived the desire to travel and visited a number of foreign countries, including Germany, where he discovered his love of German painting.
In 1937 Pietro Annigoni married Anna Giuseppa Maggini. The marriage produced two children - Benedetto, born in 1939, and Maria Ricciarda, in 1948.
Annigoni’s portraits are famous the world over. The most eminent people of this century have sat for him, and the list of their names is a long one. Time magazine has used him on its cover on no less than seven occasions. The portraits of the English Royal Family are among the best known. One of the last portraits he did was of Rossella Segreto, whom he married in 1976. His works have been bought by the most important museums in the world (Uffizi Gallery, Modern Art Gallery Pitti Palace - Florence, Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York, Royal Collection of Windsor Castle, National Portrait Gallery - London, Vatican Museums - Rome, etc.) while the great allegorical compositions have generated their full share of bewilderment or enthusiasm.
Annigoni was a painter of genius, born into a century of revolutions and controversies, and blessed with a technical ability unmatched anywhere in the world, which enabled him to produce works on a very large scale, but also medals and the tiniest of etchings.
His frescoes reconstituted the great Renaissance tradition in a modern idiom and they display skills and insights such as only the rarest of men possess. Bernard Berenson wrote of Annigoni that “he will always retain a place in the history of art as the one who challenged a dark age in painting”, and his words were prophetic in this respect.
Annigoni died in Florence on the 28th of October 1988.
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Pietro Annigoni, the last of the Italian masters. It is know that he hated Picasso and all the new movements of painting that brought art away from realism and that Italian renaissance style started by Giotto and carried on by Leonardo and Michelangelo. He made a clear statement with his work and brought back a passion for painting that in Italy had been lost for at least few hundred years. Annigoni’s work speaks for itself and I rather not interrupt.