Biography

Luciano Guarnieri is a Florentine painter, born in Florence in 1930. Very young he entered the studio of the master Pietro Annigoni, of whom he became a favorite pupil. To make him famous in Tuscany and all over the world is a folder of drawings from 1954 dedicated to the reconstruction of the Santa Trinita bridge. The postwar years directed the artist towards a vision of his work as a noble profession, related to the world of artisans. He is a generous man, a lover of the city of him and very sensitive to the appeals of Humanism. During his life, and in times of peace, Luciano travels a lot for his career and artistic production: United States, Prague, Ireland, Mexico, China… Everywhere he captures personal images of reality and special encounters: in the USA he portrays actresses from Hollywood, knows John and Jacqueline Kennedy or NASA astronauts in Cape Canaveral, for example. But Guarnieri is also a civil artist, he sings strongly about the life of the humble all over the world. He is convinced that the reasons for human existence lead to hope, a resource that no violence can truly ever oppress. He died in his hometown at 79, in 2009.

Philosophy

A lover of drawing and frescoes, Luciano Guarnieri immediately established himself as a figurative artist capable of expressiveness and incisiveness in representation due to the excellent sign that allowed him, from the age of fifteen, to trace on paper notes of buildings, squares and landscapes that he can observe. from the high window of his studio in Florence. With maestro Annigoni, he learns to use light in an exemplary way and soon develops a natural predisposition to the fresco technique. Luciano Guarnieri is an emotional painter and the tragic events that hit Florence make him an observer and critical witness: he painted the flood of November 4, 1966 working in the rubble and then stared at the mafia massacre in via dei Georgofili in 1993 in 46 drawings and watercolours preserved in a room of the Academy of Fine Arts. His continuous wandering led him to know very different realities and strong sensations that he has always translated into painting: historical events such as the American landing on the Moon in 1969 but also stories of peoples such as the land of Israel that reveals to him the pleasure of living or intimate unforgettable moments like the Irish skies observed in their slow changing. His works are now kept in the Uffizi Department of Drawings and Prints and in the Vieusseux Archive, also in Florence, but also at the Ford Foundation in New York and in other museums and churches in Tuscany and around the world.

Artwork in Castagno

At the invitation of Tommaso Paloscia, in 1975 Luciano Guarnieri created the fresco Luglio (July), a representation that places a person at the center: a half-length portrait of his wife and muse Dolores Angleton (known in the United States) immersed in the atmosphere of a quiet summer day. Her relaxed and indifferent gaze aims at the eyes of the beholder. The woman wears a straw hat, a blue shawl and cherries as earrings, fruits with which at that time the girls enjoyed playing, imagining they were jewels. A symbol of the season. Guarnieri is the only artist in the twelve-month fresco cycle who signs himself in full, unlike the other eleven painters who sign with a full name and surname. Guarnieri is also the author of the fresco inside the small church of the town: in 1982 he portrays the Saint to whom the church is dedicated, as well as the patron saint of Castagno (celebrated every first Sunday in October with the traditional Tortellata alla castagnola), a young Saint Francis, with an almost feminine face, immersed in a natural landscape that forms the background on the entire wall placed in front of the altar, above the entrance door. Without a doubt, his face is always that of his wife, often his model and reference for all the human figures he had to paint (as his family friends remember).

By Luciano Guarnieri, in Castagno there is also a third fresco, La passione at Casa Paloscia.