Bronze Sculpture for Sale
Italy
• 1933
- 2010
Biography
(Milano 1933, Spilimbergo 2010)
Innocenzo Melani was an important and highly regarded painter in the 70s and 80s.Â
His name is linked to his specific primacy as the best-selling contemporary Italian painter in reproductions of his paintings, his lithographs have sold more than thirty million worldwide, it was rare not to see in a house at least one reproduction of a painting by Innocenzo Melani, especially of the subjects that made him famous: graceful female figures, with large hats and an undefined face or battered and romantic landscapes.
Born in 1933 in Milan, his great passion and innate propensity for drawing already stood out in elementary school, which he pursued in his youth by attending art school, working in a printing shop and painting everything on any medium he could find, as if on wooden tablets detached from the furniture at home, much to his mother's despair.Â
He was discovered by the notary Olivares, an important figure in Milanese high society, who helped him successfully hold his first exhibition at the "Al Cenacolo dei Longobardi" gallery, from here, from exhibition to exhibition, the artist's success began, culminating in the exhibition at the Hotel Hilton in Milan, the gateway and international crossroads of art of that period.Â
His success was also due to his particular friendship with Giusy Achilli, owner of one of the most important Italian prestigious car dealerships (Roll Royce, etc.), who introduced him to the Milanese high finance and fashion scene, wealthy entrepreneurs, financiers, and well-known names in the news of the time became his clients.Â
His clear and poetic painting is popular with people, and many industrialists from Brianza collect his paintings and display them prominently in the halls of their sumptuous villas, major publishing houses such as Ricordi win the rights to mass reproduce his paintings on lithographs.
Towards the end of the 90s the decline began, fashions changed: it was the time for abstract art, figurative art, especially that linked to the Romantic genre, entered the oblivion of both the public and critics, Melani left his Milan and took refuge with his Mina, model of hundreds of his canvases, to live the autumn of his life in tranquility and serenity, with his art still lush, in Domanins, a remote village in Friuli, where he will end the rest of his life.
His art, defined as dreamy, is halfway between neorealism and divisionism, but absolutely not catalogable, his landscapes, with soft pastel and mother-of-pearl colours, emanate a beautiful and intense light, his horizons are distant and clear, and the women, so many women, are slender and slender figures, supple and evanescent, covered in long dresses, adorned with flowers and adorned with large straw hats these are the favorite motifs of his artistic expression.
“But the public does not know that from the very high studios, from the dormer windows with so many stairs to climb to get there, an infinite humanity emerges that no money can ever buy and pay enough; your finesse, your suffering, that of an artist who makes us stop to contemplate a reality now faded in a world ours, who is in too much of a hurry, who wants to live too intensely, a reality desired and created by you, the painter of FINESSE"Â
-Giuseppe Pedrotti-
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