Lucio Fontana

Private Collection, Europe

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, House of Italian Handicraft, Handicraft as a Fine Art in Italy, 1947, n.p., illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Buenos Aires, Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, Galería Velázquez, Exposición de las obras del IV Concurso Premio Planza, 1950 (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Lucio Fontana, April - June 1998, p. 128, no. 2/S/7, illustrated in colour

Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Borges and Museo Juan B. Castagnino, Lucio Fontana: Profeta del Espacio, 1999, p. 99, no. 46 ESC 1, illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Julio Rinaldini, ‘Lucio Fontana o la vision inflamada y dinamica del objeto’, Cabalgata, No. 16, Buenos Aires, February 1948, n.p., illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Anon., ‘L’ambiente spaziale di Lucio Fontana’, San Remo, July - August 1949, n.p., illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 20, no. 46 SC 1, illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Ethel Martínez Sobrado, ‘Fontana’, Pintores Argentinos del Siglo XX, No. 79, Buenos Aires 1981, n.p., illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Generale, Vol. I, Milan 1986, p. 85, no. 46 SC 1, illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Enrico Crispolti, Centenario di Lucio Fontana, Milan 1999, p. 35, illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. I, Milan 2006, p. 203, no. 46 SC1 (text); and illustrated (bronze edition, no. unknown)

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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“There is nothing about these sculptures to suggest the modern world. They are made to appear as old as the clay itself. At the same time they are firmly attached to the history of sculpture, attached by humour, irony and even parody. […] Some of the sculptures are inspired by an outlandish baroque fantasy.”  

Sarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, London 1999, p. 25.

Whilst Lucio Fontana is today world renowned for his iconic piercing of the canvas, his artistic genesis is rooted firmly in the medium of sculpture, and it is undeniable that this background proved paramount in articulating his conceptual understanding of space. Aquiles (David) is a unique work from this oeuvre, one of his largest sculptures ever created, and a watershed moment between his figurative and abstract styles. It was also created during a pivotal year for the artist during which he created his first Spatialist manifesto.

The present work has been known as both Aquiles (Achilles in Spanish) and David over the years. It is a near life-size depiction of a young nude male, posed in a delicate contraposto. His hands are clasped in front of him and, head cocked to one side, his hair billows upwards and back, as if dramatically flowing in the wind. In the bronze cast taken from this patinated gesso original, the figure clutches a spear which points sharply down. Thus, in pose, subject, and style, this work seems to look back on Fontana's Neo-Classical beginnings as an artist.

In the 1930s, the artist had developed a propensity for depicting the athletic form, translated into a classical context. Aquiles seems entirely reminiscent of Fontana's 1932 Campione Olimponico (Atleta Riposa), which is now in the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna. It is a full size sculpture of Cirro Verrati, the Italian fencing champion, and shares with the present work a focus on the male nude form, a titular reference to classical influence, a considered academic pose, and an idealised, almost heroic sense of form. We might also look to Fontana's 1934 sculpture, Il Fiocinatore (The Harpoonist), now owned by the University of Parma. This work is similarly golden in hue to the present sculpture, equally Hellenic in form and mood, and features a comparable sense of spear-wielding downward thrust.

However, Aquiles also looks forward, and can be viewed as a direct precursor to Fontana’s celebrated Barocchi sculptures. From the year of the present work’s production onwards, Fontana believed the sculptors of the Baroque to be the most adept at activating space and suggesting movement in the entirety of the history of art. In his subsequent Barocchi series, he made concerted attempts to emulate their distinctive sense of dynamism. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that the present work seems redolent of artists such as Gianlorenzo Bernini. We might observe its lithe idealised sense of form, or it’s composition – captured as if a single moment, frozen in time; we might even look to the flowing hair, which appears to almost echo billowing Baroque drapery. In contemporaneous influence, the present sculpture seems equitable with Alberto Giacometti's works of the same period: similarly spectral in life-size elongation, similarly aesthetically impactful, and similarly heavily modelled. It also appears to presage the expressively kneaded forms of Willem de Kooning's iconic suite of figurative bronzes from the 1970s.

1946, the year of the present work's production, was an incredibly significant year for Fontana. He had, by this stage, been living in Argentina for more than five years, unable to return to Italy owing to the outbreak of WWII, and was teaching at the newly founded Accademia di Altamira in Buenos Aires. In 1946, he came together with his students to conceive of an art that would emulate the contemporaneous discoveries of Science and Physics. In the Manifesto Bianco (White Manifesto) they instigated the launch of a new artistic direction – Spatialismo (Spatialism) – which aimed to explore the dynamic concepts of movement, colour, time, and space. It is perhaps no surprise then that, especially by comparison to the earlier works previously discussed, the present piece by Fontana is imbued with a great sense of energy and dynamism; his rotating shoulders and swaying hips imbue the work with a sense of twisting torsion and gyratory energy.

Aquiles is a fascinating work from one of the most historically significant years of Fontana's career. It stands, at near life-size, not only as testament to this artist's gestural skill, but also as tribute to the plasticity of his style. Its evocation of energy and dynamism by comparison to earlier work presents an insight into the burgeoning Spatialist movement, which would become the central tenet of Fontana's ensuing oeuvre.