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NEW - Clara Calamai - actress
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Star remembered for groundbreaking moments in Italian cinema history
The actress Clara Calamai, best known for two Italian cinema classics of the 1940s and for a cult 1970s horror film, died in the Adriatic resort of Rimini on this day in 1998, at the age of 89. Calamai’s career is generally seen to have peaked with her appearances in Luchino Visconti’s 1943 crime drama Ossessione and, three years later, in Duilio Coletti’s melodrama L’adultera, for which she won a Nastro d’Argento award as best actress. She scaled down her career drastically after marriage but won fresh acclaim three decades later for her role as Marta, a murderous ageing actress in ‘Master of Horror’ Dario Argento’s box office smash Profondo Rosso. For many years, Calamai was also known as the first woman to bare her breasts in Italian cinema - in a 1942 movie that not surprisingly caused scandal at the time - although it was later accepted that another actress, Vittoria Carpi, had beaten her to that claim to fame. Calamai, sometimes known as Clara Mais, was born in the Tuscany city of Prato, about 25km (16 miles) northwest of Florence, in 1909. She had two sisters, Vittorina and Paola, yet little is known about her early life before her big screen debut in Aldo Vergano’s 1938 historical epic, Pietro Micca. Read more…
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Cigoli – painter and architect
First artist to paint a realistic moon
The artist Cigoli was born Lodovico Cardi on this day in 1559 near San Miniato in Tuscany. He became a close friend of Galileo Galilei, who is said to have regarded him as the greatest painter of his time. They wrote to each other regularly and Galileo practised his drawing while Cigoli enjoyed making astronomical observances. Cigoli painted a fresco in the dome of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome depicting the Madonna standing upon a pock-marked lunar orb, exactly as it had been seen by Galileo through his telescope. This is the first example still in existence of Galileo’s discovery about the surface of the moon being portrayed in art. The moon is shown just as Galileo had drawn it in his astronomical treatise, Sidereus Nuncius, which published the results of Galileo’s early observations of the imperfect and mountainous moon. Until Cigoli’s fresco, the moon in pictures of the Virgin had always been represented by artists as spherical and smooth. Lodovico Cardi was born at Villa Castelvecchio di Cigoli, and was therefore commonly known as Cigoli. He trained as an artist in Florence under the Mannerist painter Alessandro Allori. Read more…
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Giacomo Quarenghi - architect
Neoclassicist famous for his work in St Petersburg
The architect Giacomo Quarenghi, best known for his work in Russia, and in St Petersburg in particular, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was born on this day in 1744 in Rota d’Imagna, a village in Lombardy about 25km (16 miles) northwest of Bergamo. His extensive work in St Petersburg between 1782 and 1816, which followed an invitation from the Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great), included the Hermitage Theatre, one of the first buildings in Russia in the Palladian style, the Bourse and the State Bank, St. George’s Hall in the Winter Palace, several bridges on the Neva river, and a number of academic buildings including the Academy of Sciences, on the University Embankment. He was also responsible for the reconstruction of some buildings around Red Square in Moscow in neo-Palladian style. Quarenghi’s simple yet imposing neoclassical buildings, which often featured an elegant central portico with pillars and pediment, are responsible for much of St Petersburg’s stately elegance. As a young man, Quarenghi was allowed to study painting in Bergamo despite his parents’ hopes that he would follow for a career in law or the church. Read more…
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Maurizio Cattelan - conceptual artist
Controversial work softened by irreverent humour
The conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, known for the dark humour and irreverence of much of his work, was born on this day in 1960 in Padua. Cattelan, probably best known for his controversial waxwork sculptures of Pope John Paul II and Adolf Hitler, has been described at different times as a satirist, a prankster, a subversive and a poet, although it seems to have been his aim to defy any attempt at categorisation. His works are often interpreted as critiques of the art world and of society in general and while death and mortality are recurring themes there is more willingness among modern audiences to see how even tragic circumstances can give rise to comedic absurdities. Although some of his work has provoked outrage, more viewers have been enthralled than angered by what he has presented, and some of his creations have changed hands for millions of dollars. Cattelan has said that his memories of growing up in Padua are of economic hardship, punishments at school and a series of unfulfilling menial jobs. His artistic skills were entirely self-taught. He was designing and making wooden furniture in Forlì, in Emilia-Romagna, when he began his first experiments with sculpture and conceptual art. Read more…
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Book of the Day: The Italian Cinema Book, edited by Peter Bondanella
Peter Bondanella is the author of a number of groundbreaking books, including Hollywood Italians, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, and The Films of Roberto Rossellini. In 2009, he was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and the Arts for his contributions to the history of Italian cinema and his translations of Italian literary classics.
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