Arrigo Minerbi

(Ferrara 1881 – Padua 1960)

The weeping of the flower (cast from the Radaelli tomb, Milan Monumental Cemetery), 1922

Plaster, 167 x 67.5 x 17 cm

Ferrara, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 1000

After training at the civic art school in Ferrara, Minerbi moved to Florence, where he deepened his knowledge of the Renaissance masters and worked as a “ceramist” and “decorator” to earn a living. It was probably in the Tuscan capital that he came into contact with the aestheticizing environment that looked to the English Pre-Raphaelites, and with Galileo Chini’s floral style inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Secessionism, as shown in Minerbi’s works in which the depiction of the nude in diaphanous and stylized forms is accompanied by a riot of plant elements. With his move first to Genoa and, after World War I, to Milan, Minerbi’s language was enriched through contact with such masters of late Symbolist sculpture as Leonardo Bistolfi and Adolfo Wildt.

The weeping of the flower, dated 1922, entered the museum’s collections following the artist’s donation of a significant group of sculptures to his city. It is a plaster cast of the central panel of the funeral monument to Angelo Radaelli (1856-1918), at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. The title reads at the bottom of the stele and is related to the epitaph placed on the base – “Was the house your temple / the garden your kingdom” – with a probable allusion to the passion for gardening or the profession of gardener.

The polished, ephebic nude seems to want to emulate the 15th-century art studied in the Florentine period and is probably influenced by the refined reinterpretation of the Pre-Raphaelites, but also by the elegant cadences of Chini’s sculpture. Minerbi achieves this perfect “synthesis between naturalism and stylization of forms” by also looking to the example of Bistofi and Wildt.