Biography

Son of peasants, Quinto Martini was born in Seano on October 31, 1908. Since he was a child he has always worked the land, and it is in that context that he discovered his passion, starting as he himself says to knead mota trying to portray the bodies of men who slept lying on the grass and alternating work in the fields to dirty the walls of the house with coal and colours, without knowing that there had ever been artists and what art was. At the age of eighteen he met Ardengo Soffici who introduced him to the Florentine artistic environment; he then attended the group of the “Scuola Leonardo” in Prato and the cabinet of Vieusseux. He obtained the chair of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence after having taught several years in various cities including Turin, Perugia and Bologna. Quinto is a solid and stubborn man who despises any form of art that smacks of intellectualism and fashion but who loves to observe the daily life of the people who move around him. During the 1980s, the Park-Museum was created in his honour by the Municipality of Carmignano, where 36 bronze statues were placed, covering the entire span of his artistic life. He continues to sculpt and paint until his death in Florence on November 9, 1990.

Philosophy

Quinto Martini is self-taught; he discovers the world of art when he introduces himself to Ardengo Soffici to show him four of his works: an important meeting that changes his life and opens him to the knowledge of contemporary, Italian and European art. In February 1927, at the first exhibition of “Il Selvaggio”, alongside the works of Mino Maccari, Carlo Carrà, Ottone Rosai, Giorgio Morandi, Achille Lega and their Master, there are also the paintings of quinto Martini. In Turin he attended Felice Casorati, Cesare Pavese and the group of the “Six” who looked at the great lesson of French painting from Manet to Cézanne. During the 19th Venice Biennale, he made his debut with “La Seanese”, in which his predisposition towards the essentiality of things emerged that led him to an anti-academic form of expression and at the same time to the choice of poor materials such as river stone and terracotta, and seeking the same simplicity of results in bronze. Thus Quinto, initiated into art by Ardengo Soffici, embarks on his own path towards certain archaisms of Etruscan sculpture, while the stylistic evolution of the author is built later through the experimentation of the artistic languages ​​typical of the twentieth century, linked by a common sense of “Return to order” and thus returning to having as supreme reference the classical antiquity, the purity of the forms and the harmony in the composition.

Artwork in Castagno

In the fresco depicting the month of June (Giugno), created in 1975 at the invitation of Tommaso Paloscia, it is easy to recognise the artist’s style: Quinto usually depicts scenes of everyday life in his paintings in which he highlights his close relationship with nature; the protagonists of his works are ordinary people immortalised in a moment of rest or during work; in fact, here the subject chosen by the artist is a peasant portrayed in the act of carrying a mass of hay, and it is no coincidence that the month of the first hay harvest is precisely June. Perhaps Quinto decided to represent this figure to remember his childhood spent in the middle of the fields, or perhaps to impress the memory of his beloved country of origin in the small village of Castagno.