Project Description
Franco Bargiggia (Milan 1888 – Sanremo 1966), Maternity
Bronze sculpture tall cm 27 signed (Franco Bargiggia) on the base large 15 cm where is visible also the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia stamp.
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Born in Milan in 1888, Bargiggia moved to Sanremo in the 1920s, where he achieved particularly appreciable results, especially in the field of plastic arts. The purity of the forms and the contained majesty of the plastic structure, built through soft and sinuous lines, project the observer into an intimate dimension that evokes the warmth of family affections. Bargiggia manages to bring out from the molded material the sense of sacredness inherent in the maternal figure, which is externalized in tender and enveloping embraces.
It would be simplistic to try to understand the aesthetic choices of Franco Bargiggia without analyzing the context in which these choices have matured: we are in the Sanremo of the early twentieth century, the Sanremo of the great art exhibitions in which they participate, alongside the most important names in the panorama contemporary art, young painters and sculptors in search of fame.
Franco Bargiggia was trained at the Brera Academy in Milan under the guidance of Butti, Mentessi and Tallone, but in the mid-twenties he made Sanremo his elective city, where he performed most of his production. In 1938 and 1939 he participated in the Genoese International Exhibition; in 1936 and 1937 at the “Città di Sanremo” Award where he won the first prize in the theme section “The departure of the soldier”, and in 1935 at the Sanremese trade union of art.
If the works of the Twenties are combined with late liberty taste, in the Thirties Bargiggia reached an intense verismo and the intimate themes linked to the family world became the fulcrum of his expressive research. His wife and daughter, still at an early age, inspired a series of subjects linked to motherhood and childhood: “Play attitude” (1932), “First child” (1933), “Motherly tenderness” (1938), preserved in the Civic Museum of Sanremo, and the famous “Evening pray” (1936), exhibited in the atrium of the Palazzo Comunale di Sanremo. Also this “Maternity” can be traced back to this corpus of works from the 1930s: the female figure is captured in this delicate composition, characterized by a nervous treatment of the bronze surface, in the act of raising her child, almost to emphasize, raising it to heaven, his sacredness.
