EXHIBITED

Esposizione Internazionale di Arte Sacra MCM-MCML, Rome, 1950

Adolfo Wildt is one of the true geniuses - and, indeed, progenitors - of Italian modern art and yet, despite his importance to Italian art history, his work is little known outside of the country of his birth.

His complex, esoteric and highly distinctive works are a lyrical synthesis of Greek, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art, seen through the lens of Viennese Symbolism and German Expressionism. His protagonists are almost always either anguished martyrs whose greatness coincides with tragedy; or victors who, despite their heroic status, contained a quiet melancholy that placed them, along with the ‘vanquished’, in the same melancholic quagmire.

In this vein, the powerful, over life-sized head of Santa Lucia, offered here on the international market for the first time, is a perfect embodiment of Wildt’s masterful play with subject-matter, and of his great skill at carving and finishing marble. With this stylised, abstracted and powerful image of the paleo-Christian saint, Wildt displays his interest in classical and expressionist art, while also directly referencing Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque masterpiece the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, completed in 1652 and installed in the Coronaro family chapel, in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

Works by Wildt very rarely come on to the international market, so the re-emergence of a large and iconic work as the Santa Lucia is particularly exceptional.

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