The versatility of Marcello Fantoni: premise for a critical fortune The vast works of Marcello Fantoni clearly reflects the fervor of his young vocation to become an artist in the field of ceramics. From the beginning of his education the boy was convinced that this archaic means, as old as the civilization of man, reserved unedited expressive potential, that would be released from the alliance between form-fire-material-color. A precious ceramic with unedited fascination, discoverable day after day creator that could surround that tetrameter of elements if he wanted to work letting himself be conditioned only by his own imagination.

Instinctively attracted to investigate form, Fantoni went on to experiment with the mass and line of objects, vascular forms and plastic figures, all of which are united by the modern taste and the handling of the material, through infinite suggestivity of impressions, vibrations, traces, roughness; that the glazes, distributed on the rough clay support as a supplement to the material, accentuating the 'micro' the massive sense of repressed fluid magma. A plastic, material, and structural search that in Fantoni looks towards what is new, or to what is new but could happily come to us from the classic, filtering the archaic elements through the mixture of modern elements that in addition to a patient experimenting presuppose the gifts of intuition and invention of the artist: a versatility that comprehends the plastic sense of the sculptor and the chromatic sense of a painter. For this wide range of expressivity ceramics could rise, from a product of simply decorative virtues, and therefore often considered the child of a lesser god, to an authentic art form capable of expressing the spirituality of one own time.

With this conviction Fantoni has worked, alternating his fortunate commercial production with vascular forms and small unique figures, in their formal and chromatic expression the continuous and extremely personal updates of the artistic tendencies of the artist's own time are evident. Consequently the corpus of the Fantonian work can be defined, as Gian Carlo Bojani has written, as "possible and concrete verification of the relationship between ceramics and contemporary art." For its continuous and original research, the work of Marcello Fantoni has been the object of notable and authoritative critical interest. It began with a review in 1933 and it offers a complete monitoring of the seven decades of the artist's profuse activity in the setting of his own time, recognizing each and every time, next to or within his activity as a ceramist his gifts as a designer, painter, sculptor and medalist.

It was for his graphic gifts that the young Fantoni was mentioned in the oldest review that has come down to us today, with recognition for the 'rapid' 'composition and inventive' of his drawing on tiles, among which the 'Good Pastor' was present, to his solid installation of the figures with the lamb on his sholders balances the synthetic mark of the face depicted in profile with vaguely deco results. His graphic sketches are imaginative representations between the deco stile and the decomposition of the futurists for the study of a freize for the construction workers' recreatioanl club and for a soccer trophy, both from '29, where the chromatic graduation of the figures and the geometry that we find in the colors that over the decades will be copied for their glazes and their vascular form.

The commitment of Fantoni as a designer will be evidenced after the seventies, with an exhibit with the taste of a rediscovery in the Cloister of San Marco, at the request of Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani the artist donated a group of graphic works to the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi.

The first article singling out Fantoni as a serial ceramist and creator of unique pieces, that seemed curiously flattering to the point of being almost publicity, came out in 1937 in the newspaper Il Telegrafo, in occasion of the VII Arts and Crafts Exhibit in Florence: "In the ceramic area, on the stand of professor Fantoni- a very young artist who has recently finished the art school at Porta Romana-we have noted a Tea Service, (sic) with twenty commission cards, and the young artist had to suspend the orders because he is unable to finish them in the required period of time; for his other tea services, among them the one in black, Fantoni has also had many commissions, without mentioning the infinite variety of vases that have repeatedly been ordered by private clients as well as companies, are original for their form and color, created with modern spirit united with a traditional sobriety of line, decoration and astuteness of a practical character."

And so Fantoni's activity took off. Artisan and artist this "authentic Florentine thoroughbred" as Antonio Paolucci recently wrote as he compared Fantoni to the Della Robbia workshop: like those artisans Fantoni is someone who obstinately looks for excellence in the works that leave his hands, but at the same time he desires to create models, stimulate imitations and comparisons, indicate a level of quality under which we should not fall."

Since 1939 we can note an interest of journalism in the field of Fantonian works, among which the most important showcases for his work were the competitions in Faenza, and the reviews in the prestigious magazine Domus by Gio Ponti. In 1957 with the full acquisition of the modern esthetic theories, the wake of which continued consolidating itself with the idea of a ceramics renewed in substance into a modern and autonomous form of art, Fantoni's pioneering work had a valuable critical investigation from Gualtiero Loria in the catalogue "Fifty Italian Ceramists" which underlines how " his works are not just creations of ceramics valuable for their composition, for the rarity and the colors of the glazes, for the difficulty of the artistic concept. There are pieces of absolute originality and highly significant esthetics."

Due acknowledgement for a path of evolution that since the second half of the forties launched the figurative thematic of the "Allegories of the Hunt' (one of a kind pieces are at the Bargello Museum) and the more common 'warriors' and 'knights', figures that are superb for their form and the empathy between plasticity-material-glaze-color. With them the ceramic sculpture of Fantoni acquired the body and soul of an authentic work of art, establishing a bridge between the past and the present, stretched over the tormented magma of the material. The fluidity of forms which were followed by, around the middle of the fifties, blockier figures a more stylized polychrome, obtained by plastic counterpoints of the full and empty spaces. One of a kind pieces that are now rare of the 'harlequins' and 'pastors', plastic groups like 'The Family' or like 'Woman seated in the act of combing her hair' and the 'Satire in love'. This last figure (received a prize in 1954 together with 'Woman Seated' at the XII National Competition of Ceramics in Faenza and both of them were acquired by the International Museum of Ceramics of that city) in a long review by Danilo Dani who indicated "the most beautiful work of art by Marcello Fantoni/ in which the harmony of colors melt into the perfect linearity/ to create an original play of colors which are extremely difficult to obtain." These figures, in which the multifaceted structures bear suggestions derived from cubist formulas, open the way for his abstract polychrome sculptures, like the block fired at high temperature made in '57, that entered into the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Among the growing affirmations that the following decades registered the creative versatility of the artist, Dino Pasquali recognized him as " a clay model maker brilliantly wearing the clothes of a sculptor in ceramics", following a path that passed, according to Tommaso Paloscia, "through arcane streets of communication" capable of "developing little by little the art of sculpture in his own personal style, rigorously taken with the inalienable canons of plastic art and always remaining in the manipulation of clay."

The seventies had arrived, and with them the sculpture of Fantoni went on synthesizing itself in concluded blocks, simulating rocks and boulders in a probable suggestion of the masses of pietra serena emerging from the side of the steep hill where Monterinaldi is located, as Paolucci says, "his villa and laboratory is attached to the rock and at hundred and eighty degrees like a swallow's nest." Sculptures in which also the material, that up until now has rebelled in the clay surface which was called to itself in tensions that were just as material as the color-glazes, that were calmed in ivory transparencies, smoothly following the structure of the form.

They were 'pure rarefactions' of 'abstract sculptures in white' were as Umberto Baldini, wrote in '73 "Beyond material / beyond the color, the form is absolutely dominating. The form surpasses the circumstantial values of objectivity to rise to the absolute values of sculpture, in the true sense of the word, through a construction where the balances and masses, design and plasticity, are united in a relationship of vital consanguinity. Sculpture, therefore, in the widest and most profound way of interpreting, making and enjoying it."

And to be a sculptor, with the full technical and compositional faculties to realize an abstract form or raise groups of figures, even in large dimensions, Fantoni has demonstrated since the fifties, after '39 he created ceramic portraits and feminine nudes, as the fragment of the laying figure in the Museum of Faenza that is exhibited in this exhibit, and figures like Saint John the Baptist in the Collegio della Querce in Florence. In the fifties and sixties large sculptures followed, like the altarpiece on the main altar of San Domenico a Cagliari, ten meters tall, in which Loria identified in '57 the "great expressive potential of its elements". And again in large dimension the artist will cement his position, also outside of the field of ceramics using canonical materials of sculpture, the metals, like the six meter tall Crucifix in iron for the Pisan church of C.E.P. designed by Italo Gamberini and the monument in bronze of two figures, three meters tall for the Fallen Soldiers of the Liberation of Vaglia.

The experiences with metal which were repeated with abstract sculptures, like the large 'piece' in copper from '61 which won an award at the National Exhibit in Gubbio, and his largest bronze finished in '66 for the Roman headquarters of the company Permaflex, will perhaps contribute to focusing attention on his works in metal, because of their dimensions and relief of his work in engraving and medalism are completely different. A peculiar art, in which, as Fulvio Apollonio wrote in 1980 in the volume Scultura toscana del Novecento, Fantoni "recuperated from ceramics" was "rapidly inserted into the restricted number of medalists of great talent".

And "looking at it closely"- as Baldini also noted- "in Fantoni's activity there is always, even where it doesn't appear evident, a constant attention to the graphic, a quick stroke, almost incised, barely resolved and attenuated in bas-relief." So that "his way of expressing his own view of reality and his message could not help but launch his work into the field of coining medals."

In that launch in '76 the liquid and seismic fusions were created for medals dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the flood of Florence and the earthquake of Fruili, after which followed in the next two years the medal for the 150th anniversary of the death of Beethoven and for the 600th anniversary of the birth of Ghiberti. And once again in '80 the 'anno mediceo' the medal of Lorenzo il Magnifico. And others dedicated to La Pira and Savonarola. Gastone Breddo wrote of these works that "they are handled with a delicate and precious plastic language" and that having had "motives to use here, at the Academy of Florence, the collaboration of this artist, who certainly knew how to give his students the thirst to search for excellent quality that today emerges from a quick glance at these stupendous medals."

From this versatility of a master of the Renaissance workshops, like Paolucci wrote, means "becoming one with art/ dedicating oneself with humility and patience, but also with good cheer and generosity", this is how the critical fortune that has accompanied Fantoni for seven decades originated through innumerable creations that place him as a true maestro ceramist among ceramists, sculptor among sculptors, medalist among "the restricted number of medalists". For that long and not exhausted creativity, the masterpieces of which have enriched the collections and museums of the entire world, the Soprintendenza ai Beni Culturali of Florence has decided to pay public homage in the room of the Reali Poste of the Uffizi to this Florentine artist, who presents himself today, for his creativity and energy, on his eightieth birthday.

Marco Moretti