Floriano Bodini (1933 - 2005)

Devil or holy water? An author who has spent most of his life between customer cardinal but maintained an irreverent and ironic even in the face of ruthless power, including the spiritual. Floriano Bodini, Lombard Gemonio (VA) '33, Brera is formed in the immediate post-war under the direction of Francesco Messina, the first teacher and then close friend in a friendship that has been lost throughout the course of a life.

In the Milan between the Fifties and Sixties is to young people who have lived on their skin the war, maybe back to the stories of parents, uncles returned from the country of Russia. But it is also the moment of artistic fervor, when people like Joseph Guerreschi, Gianfranco Ferroni , Mino Ceretti and, indeed, Bodini, give life to what is now known as existential realism. Union of philosophical ideas, handwritten by the authors open more powerfully present in the imagination of that particular historical moment (we refer to Camus and Sartre in particular), the desire to return to the meditation on reality, shocked by the event of total war (and many monuments and sculptures dedicated to the fallen or the theme of war in Bodini have this disruptive force and gloss of reality), shocked by the misery and devastation left by the defeat and death. But they are also the years when the activist art, art and merges with participating in politics, after the events in Hungary, he feels a need to fish out the themes of intimacy, to look to family, lived.

War, religion, family: these are the three main areas in which the work of Bodin moves. Sculptor capable of great monuments and the strong profile as civil Seven of Göttingen, for the square outside the parliament in Hanover, stately complex and deliberately high-impact, including visual inspection, created to celebrate the greatness of wisdom to stop the rebellion authoritarian , with seven professors (including the famous brothers Grimm fabulists) who publicly protested against the abolition of the Constitution by Ernst of Hanover. Complain paid with the loss of the chair and some of them with exile.

Bodini But perhaps more exciting is that his work intersects with the more personal dimension: through the halls of the Museum of Gemonio Bodini (VA), a small town museum opened in 2005, surely the most striking works is a portrait of his father . A little man, middle-class, fully clothed, educated in an austere classicism. From which sprout alongside blacks corvacci, sign of imminent death or more properly a kind of irreverent mockery, but a perfect counterpoint to the severity of the father?

Even the bronzes depicting the popes are crossed almost a split that runs between the sculpture from the representation as the most good-natured portrait of a pope, now in the Vatican Museums, and others where instead gaze becomes more critical as Pope in 1970, exhibited in the Museum Bodini said. In quet'ultimo Pope takes a break that recalls the portrait of the earthly father, the real one with corvacci that have been said just above. A pope in closed his clothes, crushed by the enormous hat, almost removed from the world by his suit protects but the authority which separates it together and makes it immune from contact with others.

Posted figures of fathers, distant buildings: very different from the vortex of suffering instead of the statues of the fallen, the scenes of death related to war. The Lamento sull'ucciso of 1971 is perhaps the most touching, a kind of modern Pietà where the dead, skeletal, with their limbs choked, twisted, lying in front of the figure who gave up the pity in his knee.

Paul VI), in the Cathedral of Parma (Portrait of Cardinal Ferrari), his is the high altar of the Shrine of the Holy House of Loreto, and St. Bridget of Sweden placed Basilca inside of St. Peter. Two appearances at the Venice Biennale in 1962 and 1982, and numerous awards achieved in life. Floriano Bodini now rests in the Monumental Cemetery in Milan.