[...] the female images presented by Greco prompted critics to seek points of reference in classical antiquity and to note the contrast between the archaic features (sometimes influenced by the “Etruscan syntheses” of Marino Marini) and the softness of the limbs. 

A leading practitioner of Italian figurative sculpture during World War II and the immediate post-war period, Emilio Greco established himself in the 1950s with broad support and acclaim from critics, first and foremost Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Fortunato Bellonzi. It was during that decade in particular that Greco developed his trademark style of moderate abstraction with graceful anatomical disarticulation while drawing on the contemporary sculptural approach of Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzù. It is indeed no coincidence that critics were often to suggest the influence on his work of medieval sculpture, to which Bellonzi ventured in 1962 to add late Mannerism and the Baroque on the grounds of certain sensual poses adopted by the numerous female nudes produced during his career.¹ Recalling the lengthy dispute occasioned a few years earlier by Greco’s large Monumento a Pinocchio (Monument to Pinocchio, 1953-56) for the town of Pescia, Carlo Munari suggested in a short study of 1958 that his work “bears witness to the difficulties that young Italian sculpture was forced to overcome in this postwar period in order to establish itself legitimately in the contemporary era”.² From the “melancholy Hellenism” noted by Ragghianti in his presentation of the show at the Strozzina in 1953 to the “sibyllinity” identified by Munari and the possible “literary trap” into which the viewer might fall due to the “insidious power of its highly evocative gracefulness”,³ the female images presented by Greco prompted critics to seek points of reference in classical antiquity and to note the contrast between the archaic features (sometimes influenced by the “Etruscan syntheses” of Marino Marini) and the softness of the limbs. Attention should then be drawn in particular to the artist’s interest in serpentine poses, in sudden twists and turns of the figure that create a movement of lines and a multiplicity of viewpoints both in the large sculptures and in the small bronzes, in the upright or walking figures and in those cosily reclining, as in the case of the Cerruti Zenobia. It is precisely this way of constructing the image, with a twist that alters its perception from every viewpoint, revealing profiles unexpected at first sight, that conveys - according to Bellonzi - the impression of a “decorative and naturalistic fable”⁴ clearly represented by the Monumento a Pinocchio but detectable also in the Grande Bagnante n. 1 (Large Bather no. 1), for which the artist was awarded the first prize for sculpture at the 28th Venice Biennale. On that occasion, perhaps implicitly in response to denigrators of the artist, Giorgio Castelfranco wrote in the catalogue that Greco was “not a creator of distorted constructions but of subtle modulations of life and hence primarily of light on forms”.⁵ Some poses, like that of the small Cerruti nude, were indeed to find numerous points of reference in his graphic art, where the sculptor’s flattening of physiognomy attained full expression. As Munari observed in 1958, confirming the inclination towards classicism in his sculpture, in the final analysis, “Greco is a man who still takes time to contemplate the cadence of columns in the luminous space of the island, the tree that turns into a human body and the body that becomes a column in the course of faraway poetic metamorphoses.”⁶ 

Luca Pietro Nicoletti 

¹ Bellonzi 1962. 

² Munari 1958, p. 8. 

³ Bellonzi 1962, p. 17. 

⁴ Ibid., p. 15. 

⁵ G. Castelfranco, “Emilio Greco”, in Venice 1956, p. 149. 

⁶ Munari 1958, p. 18.