In that dizzying national and international sculptural ferment that erupted in Turin in the post-Unification period and lasted until the first decade of the new century—stimulated by the prestige of the chair of sculpture at the Accademia Albertina, held first by the Swiss Vincenzo Vela (who resigned in 1867 after the negative outcome of the competition for the Cavour monument in Piazza Carlo Emanuele II) and then passed to the Lombard Odoardo Tabacchi—within that extraordinary ferment, as was said, several remarkable artists emerged. Among them, for stature and personality, Luigi Contratti certainly deserves to be remembered. Born in Portogruaro on April 11, 1868, Contratti is considered partly Brescian and partly Turinese by adoption, since he received his first training in the Lombard city and completed his studies in the Piedmontese capital, where he matured artistically and achieved a certain success, until his premature death on October 27, 1923. After elementary school, young Luigi entered as an apprentice in the historic workshop of the Faitini stonecutters, where he remained for three years learning to sculpt ornamentations; he later attended the School for Stonemasons of Casa Vantini “alle tre Spade,” where he also studied drawing. Determined to follow his artistic calling, in the autumn of 1882 he moved to Turin, where he enrolled at the Accademia Albertina and entered the studios of Tabacchi, Bistolfi, and Luigi Belli. Upon completing his studies, in 1889 he won the Brozzoni Bequest competition in Brescia—chaired by the Scapigliato sculptor Ernesto Bazzaro and the painter Cesare Tallone; in the same year, he made his debut at the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin, exhibiting an ornamental vase (Fantasia), highly admired and praised by critics.

Appointed assistant professor at the School of Sculpture of the Albertina, a position he held for fourteen years, he participated in several competitions, obtaining commissions for the funerary monument of Giacinto Pacchiotti (1896) at the Cimitero Monumentale of Turin—considered his masterpiece—for the cement group Il Po in the fountain of the 1898 Italian General Exhibition, and for the monument to Galileo Ferraris (1903), initially placed in the garden on the south side of Palazzo Madama and moved in 1928 to Corso Galileo Ferraris. Appointed assistant professor at the chair of sculpture of the Accademia Albertina—after Tabacchi’s death, succeeded by the Florentine Cesare Zocchi—Contratti also created two of the four monumental allegorical groups at the corners of the Umberto I bridge (Il Valore and Il Sacrificio), installed on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Industry and Labor in Turin and inaugurated in the presence of the king in September 1911. Having distinguished himself in other Italian and foreign competitions, the sculptor joined, between 1915 and 1920, the board of the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna of Turin (which preserves the 1893 bronze Silenzio verde), together with Pietro Canonica, Edoardo Rubino, and Gaetano Cellini. In those years, between the end of the Great War and his death, he trained the new, promising generation of Turinese sculptors, among whom we should at least remember Roberto Terracini.

At the beginning of a heartfelt article in memory of Contratti, published in La Stampa on October 28, 1923, the musicologist and art critic Ernesto Ferrettini recalled the late artist in these words: “I see again his face, shadowed by a veil of melancholy, and his gentle, profound eyes that seemed to want to penetrate our soul, as if seeking in it the comfort of a smile, since his own soul could no longer smile in the darkness thickened around him by the death of his son, fallen at the front. And he was immersed in silent, thoughtful sorrow: in a state of contemplation […] within which perhaps slithered a sense of revolt against the cruelty of fate (which his innate gentleness, however, knew how to master so as to conceal it from others), a certain inner strength […] prevailed: the dignified pride of a truly noble spirit; a meekness that was, in truth, mastery of will—that will which had supported Luigi Contratti from his earliest years, since the time when Turin saw him, the poor son of a Brescian stonemason, struggling to earn his bread and his name.”

The achievement of a prominent position in the crowded artistic scene of Turin at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, therefore, a hard-won conquest for Contratti, who was forced to temper his naturally gentle and non-competitive character—as Ferrettini observed with precision, continuing his moving remembrance: “To look at Contratti was to think of certain Quattrocento depictions of apostles; to converse with him, once his innate shyness had dissipated and speech began to flow, slowly at first, then more animated and colorful, though always with dignified and profound thought, one’s mind would turn to certain dialogues of sixteenth-century artists, as some historians have handed down to us.”

No one has yet studied in depth, with philological rigor, the figure and work of Contratti; and this is an unpardonable gap in art historiography (not only at the local level) that should finally be filled. Beyond the artist’s actual stature, there would emerge an “exceptional” and refined human personality—not so distant, in sensitivity and ideals, from that of Bistolfi, to whom Contratti was indeed deeply connected, especially during the crucial years of his training and early maturity. To better define the man’s character, let us continue to listen to Ferrettini: “His reserved manners, the delicacy of his feelings, the constant desire to work kept Luigi Contratti away from any vain or ambitious personal rivalry; he lived in seclusion because he chose to: artistic circles and their related intrigues were not for him. The school of sculpture he taught at our Accademia Albertina was, for Luigi Contratti, a duty that he fulfilled with persistent humility and almost with religious fervor. Thus he found affection among his students, and this he sought far more than admiration. But his students saw and knew how great his worth was. Beyond the walls of his studio, adjacent to the school, their eyes would peer; now and then news of some new triumph of the master would run through the classrooms, and the students rejoiced and […] gathered around him. Good lads! Some of them have already managed to make a good name for themselves in art.”

The new energies of an Accademia Albertina advancing toward modernity were such as to gladden and console the masters recently departed to heaven: “And surely smiling down from above at the school of sculpture he so dearly loved is good Cesare Zocchi… And smiling too is Luigi Contratti… Both worthy of following in the deep footsteps left in academic teaching by Vincenzo Vela and Odoardo Tabacchi!” (Ferrettini 1923, p. 6).

In 1892 Contratti modeled a second superb ornamental vase, following the one presented in 1889, the year of his memorable official debut at the Turinese Promotrice—an exhibition recalled years later by Ernesto Bertarelli in an article published in the journal of the 1898 General Exhibition: “Contratti is one of the few sculptors who from the very beginning had a clear vision of the dignity of art and of the purpose to which it must aspire. Very young, he entered Tabacchi’s studio, later joining Bistolfi’s, where he produced his first work, an ornamental vase, which Count Toesca rightly judged ‘a work conceived and executed with refined and delicate taste: a jewel, in a word, of craftsmanship.’ He then moved on to Belli’s studio, where he remained for a long time. From his masters, he retained in his own art but a few elements: only the influence of Northern, and especially English, art occasionally brings his works close to those of Bistolfi, since, like him, he assimilated from foreigners many of those elements lacking in Italian art and classical tradition. Otherwise, his art is essentially personal. He handles the modeling tool and shapes clay as he conceives ideas: he allows no artifices or subterfuges. A scrupulous observer of nature, he sometimes sacrifices certain aspects of plastic effect to achieve faithful representation; yet his sculpture, despite a certain roughness, is harmonious and elegant” (Bertarelli 1898, p. 39).

Bertarelli, understandably, perceived as “roughness” Contratti’s agile and fluid handling, already freed from nineteenth-century academicism and ready to breathe the first hints of the new century. The observation of the artist’s vision as “not particularly Italian” is especially interesting, as it grasped many stimuli from the updated figurative languages of Northern and Central Europe—but also, of course, from nearby France. This is clearly evident in the vase under discussion, imbued with the same suggestions that Rodin captured and expressed in some of his well-known vase drawings with putti, dating from between 1879 and 1882.

In the ornamental vase of 1892—decidedly more uninhibited and modern than the 1889 Fantasia, still marked by late-nineteenth-century eclecticism—Contratti seems to foreshadow an iconographic structure and even some stylistic traits of Liberty, anticipating by a decade the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art held at Turin’s Valentino Park in 1902. The female figure—boldly seated semi-nude on the rim of the vase itself, while a quivering flight of butterflies and dragonflies (and even the insidious, barely visible presence of a spider’s web) merges with the folds of the light garment covering her legs—is, on one hand, formally tied to the serene sensuality typical of the Belle Époque, and on the other, subtly reveals, with restraint, the “dark side” of the eternal feminine and of an entire era nearing its end—something that would soon be fully revealed, in all its forms, by Art Nouveau, the first explosive style of modernity, consumed like a flame at the dawn of the twentieth century. The bronze version realized by the former Milanese Scapigliato Emilio Sperati (1861–1931), a sculptor and founder settled in Turin, represents the best imaginable outcome for this rediscovered masterpiece—almost certainly a unique and hitherto unpublished piece—which has preserved its original ebonized wooden turned base: the sensuous softness of the female body, the drapery of the garment, the light flutter of the butterflies’ wings—all are rendered with remarkable finesse and delicacy, worthy of Luigi Contratti’s vivid and assured modeling, brought to life by the bronze in every minute detail, in every exquisite subtlety.

Armando Audoli