Leonardo Bistolfi
1859–1933 · Italian Symbolist sculptor
Leonardo Bistolfi (born in Casale Monferrato on 15 March 1859, died in La Loggia on 3 September 1933) was an Italian sculptor and the leading figure of Symbolism in Italy. Although his name is mainly linked to sculpture, his symbolist aesthetic shaped artistic production in Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also served as a senator of the Kingdom of Italy during the twenty-sixth legislature, but this role is secondary to his artistic career.
The son of a sculptor, he enrolled in 1876 at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan with the help of a municipal grant, and later attended courses at the Accademia Albertina in Turin. His early works, made between 1880 and 1885, reflect the influence of the Milanese Scapigliatura. Around 1882 and 1883 he moved towards Symbolism with the Angel of Death for the Brayda tomb and the bust of Antonio Fontanesi. For decades he produced busts, medals and portraits of figures of his time, among them Cesare Lombroso and Edmondo De Amicis.
His attempts to win commemorative monument competitions were largely unsuccessful. The Sphinx for the Pansa di Cuneo tomb, dated 1892, marks the beginning of his more poetic Symbolism, and from then on his recurring themes centred on the moment of passage into death. This earned him the nickname "Poet of Death", a label he reportedly accepted reluctantly. Between 1892 and 1894 he decorated the sixteenth chapel of the Sacro Monte di Crea. He moved in Turin's intellectual circles, which leaned towards positivism and moderate socialism, and in 1902 he co-founded with other artists the magazine Il arte decorativo moderno. He took part in the first Venice Biennale and in five further editions up to 1905.
His legacy is preserved in the Gipsoteca Leonardo Bistolfi in Casale Monferrato, which holds more than 170 works, and in museums such as the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin. His work influenced later funerary sculptors, especially in the Staglieno monumental cemetery in Genoa. He died in La Loggia in 1933 and was buried in Casale Monferrato.