Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Greek coffee frequency in Rome, an unavoidable reference for the nascent Italian symbolism and adhering to the “Art Libertas” Association, was already present at the first edition of the Venice Biennale, which will become an assiduous participant and also collaborator. The exhibition “Giulio Aristide Sartorio the poem of human life” is held from
May 16th to 28th September 2025 Venice in Ca ‘Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art Exhibition Rooms II Piano.
On the proposal of Antonio Fradeletto, Secretary General of the Biennale, in the spring of 1906 Sartorio agrees to create a large decorative cycle to be placed in the Central Salone of the International Exposition of 1907. He is entrusted with the official assignment to illustrate, on the basis of ancient mythology, the poem of human life. In the four main scenes – light, darkness, love, death – alternating with ten vertical canvases (where grace and art supported by virile energy are represented) the artist proposes a dramatic vision of existence, from birth to death. Between the two extremes there are the allegories of darkness and the divergence between The figures of Eros and Himeros, the good and bad love.
The complex iconography put in place by Sartorio, also approved by Gabriele D’Annunzio, appears as the synthesis between the Mediterranean world and the Nordic culture. Without architectural elements and resolved in monochrome, the pictorial cycle is indicated for the exceptional deployment of moving figures who, in the telebests of darkness and death, take on rotating form, confirming the symbolic entity of the whole.
To complete the approximately 230 square meters of the work in just nine months Sartorio adopts a rather rapid pictorial technique:
“I used a mixture of wax, Acquaragia and poppy oil”. Composition confirmed by the analysis of the Sciences Laboratory for the conservation of the DAIS, the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice. The fourteen scenes, installed for the inauguration of the 1907 exhibition, remained in situ also for the next edition and therefore took the path of Ca ‘Pesaro thanks to the gift that Vittorio Emanuele III had, in 1909, at the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice.
The complex events of the cycle have left evident signs in the conservative history of this extraordinary work. Thanks to the last restoration, which took place between 2018 and 2019, it was possible to collect a large scientific documentation, useful not only to select the conservative interventions necessary for the occasion, but also precious for the constant care of this splendid page of Italian painting at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In order to fully understand the meaning of the large cycle of Sartorio, its context has been reconstructed both through documents from different archives, and thanks to a choice of national and foreign works exposed to the Biennials in the same years and received at the same time in the collections of Ca ‘Pesaro. All these materials, together with the complete exposure of the cycle itself and the documentation proper to the restoration, constitute the nerb of the current exhibition proposal. The exhibition can be visited from 16 May to 28 September 2025, with the time and the museum ticket.
Carlo Franza