Mario Donizetti
Mario Donizetti is esteemed to be today the greatest exponent of
realism in painting. In a recent CNN-International documentary, Elsa Klensch states that
"his timeless quality captured in his paintings made him famous around the
world".
Fundamental are his
"Crucifixion" in the Museum of the Treasury in St. Peter's Basilica in Vaticano,
his frescoes and altarpiece in the historical Monastery of Pontida; his portraits of Lady
Diana Spencer (1981),
of Indira Ghandi (1984), of John Paul II (1985) and of Deng Xiaoping
(1997) published on cover by "Time" magazine; the portraits of Costanza, his
wife and inspirer; the portraits of famous figures in the theatre world
(Jean Louis
Barrault, Marta Abba, Vittorio Gassman, Giorgio Albertazzi, Valentina Cortese, Edvige
Feuillère, Marcel Marceau, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Rudolph Nureiev).
An exhibition of his most important works was held in 1983-84 in the Halls of the
Museum of Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. He is preparing an anatomy text-book based on
hundreds of anatomic drawings. Through a personal conception of the idea of reality and
its representation, Donizetti opposes the theories which assert the informality of art.
A contributor to daily papers and magazines, Donizetti has also
published important writings about the restauration and preservation of old masterpieces
and a book "Why Figurative" (1992) where his aesthetic arguments have an aim
which goes beyond the defence of his choice.
They offer a necessary alternative to the
foundation of the Kantian aesthetic judgment regarded by Donizetti as a doctrinaire error
and starting-point for modern artistic informalism. Mario Donizetti maintains - as Jean
Louis Ferrier metaphorically wrote in "Le Point" - that "Kant, Hegel,
Croce... ont introduit le ver dans le fruit de la réalité, à savoir le subjectivisme...
" (...they have introduced the worm into the fruit of reality, that is the
subjectivism...).
"Why Figurative" is, from one of the great protagonists of
contemporary art, a lucid critique on the "Critique of Judgment" by Immanuel
Kant.