Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
Jorio was born on 2 June 1922 in Fognano, a town near Montale (Pistoia), by Alice Preti and Diego Vivarelli, and owes his name to the protagonist of the book La Figlia di Iorio by Gabriele D’Annunzio; while the child becomes a boy and therefore a man we witness the rise of the Fascist Party. The young Jorio, however, grows up in the tranquility of the countryside, where he spends his summers looking after his uncles’ pigs; he immediately became passionate about sculpture (his father is in fact a stonemason and initiates him to the love for stone) and therefore he enrolled at the Art Institute of Florence. But soon, as was perhaps his fate, the call to arms arrives for him and Jorio is sent to the Balkans, where he is taken prisoner in 1943: he will travel around half of Europe in chains. It is in these years that he sees pain in the face, which will tend to permeate all of his artistic work. In 1946 he returned to Pistoia as a completely changed man, and began to frequent numerous artists; in the 50s he achieved success, thanks to his remarkable talent as a sculptor, and his industriousness in the cultural field led to the formation of the Intrarealist Group in 1963, a circle of artists (including even Federico Fellini) aimed at the avant-garde that “has the need to say something new and to express it in a different way “(from the manifesto of the Group). He died on 1 September 2008 in his villa in Pistoia.
Philosophy
Jorio Vivarelli is a prominent sculptor after World War II, a prominent artistic figure in the Italian scene of those years; going through various phases (among which we can recall the one between ’56 and ’64, during which he mainly produced crucifixions) he is able to coin a unique language: he synthesises a large number of styles, from Etruscan art to the avant-garde twentieth century, amalgamating them with his own personal and tragic vision of the world, developed largely due to his experience in war. In fact, perhaps the only constant in the artist’s work is suffering, the pain that in one way or another he manages to transmit to the stone. Jorio’s are often amorphous figures, human larvae bent by existence, witnesses of an endless drama that emerge from the primordial matter, the rock; in particular towards the end of his career the artist’s sculptures become more and more abstract and metaphysical.
Artwork in Castagno
Vivarelli has always been a very active artist in Pistoia and its surroundings, as evidenced by the Pistoiese Jorio Vivarelli Foundation, where you can visit the house-studio and a large collection of works. Thanks to the invitation of Tommaso Paloscia, he also left one of his sculptures at the Castagno Open Air Museum: the Crucifixion, located precisely under the portico of the Church of San Francesco, is not the only sculpture of this type created by the artist ( two other famous Crucifixes by Vivarelli are those of the Church of the Virgin of Pistoia and of the Church of the Autostrada in Florence, both dating back to the 1950s). The Crucifixion in Castagno is in bronze and its peculiarity is to depict a mutilated Christ, therefore even more suffering than we are used to seeing him: in this Christ, the artist expresses his deep pain linked in particular to the military experience that , as told, he marked him throughout his life and so did his art.