Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
The artist Vitaliano De Angelis was born in Florence in 1916, where he studied at the Institute and at the Magisterium of Art, a pupil of the sculptor Bruno Innocenti. He is a jumper, a gymnast; in fact his friend Silvano Filippelli describes him by comparing him to a “rod-man, on the top of which hang a pair of listless moustaches oppressed by two eyes which, with their penetrating melancholy, sway on that pole like a continuous signal of wakefulness”. Vitaliano is also used to write poems and thoughts to facilitate the approach to his inner world: affections, work, study, nature, the city, life, pain and death are the images that speak of his soul, of his researches, of the hopes and torments that accompany him in his long and tormented life. The acknowledgments of his sculptor activity begin early; in 1940 he obtained two first prizes at the Livorno Provincial Sculpture Exhibition thanks to his work called “La Dri”. The artist loves to travel to Paris, but lives and works mainly in Livorno where he presents many exhibitions accompanied by other artists such as Renzo Grazzini and Vinicio Berti. Vitaliano died in Livorno on April 19, 2002.
Philosophy
As far as the sculptural style is concerned, De Angelis, while experimenting with different procedures and different materials to produce his works, strongly adheres to the figurative module, that is, he creates works that are immediately traceable to images present in the world around us; this style derives from a profound artistic conviction of the sculptor who established himself thanks to his experiences. The sense of tradition is active and operating in him from the beginning, as a perennial stimulus to his imagination, which does not trace the images of the past, but rather tends to recreate them in a new formulation, without worrying in the least about their actuality. De Angelis is a sculptor faithful to himself; however, the love of solitude does not deny contact with a difficult present and the understanding of an experimentalism at all levels. Another important aspect in De Angelis sculptor is certainly the meticulousness of the sketches which must have a gestural rendering, or rather of the motion of the body, which helps the plastic rendering of the work.
Artwork in Castagno
The work that Vitaliano has created for the village of Castagno is Meditazione (Meditation) and it is a stone statue that represents a naked woman without arms. The style of De Angelis is the result of a synthesis between modernity and classic references; in general the references to tradition are many, but all these ideas are reinterpreted in a modern key (however realism always strongly prevails over abstractionism). It is from here that we can start to analyse Meditation: it is a real contemporary Venus, modest in her elegance, her head bowed almost as a sign of modesty; covered with lichens over time, the stone statue is perfectly integrated within the walls of the village that hosts it.