Arrigo Minerbi

(Ferrara 1881 – Padua 1960)

Maternity (cast of relief for the Istituti Clinici Mangiagalli, Milan), 1930 Plaster, 172 x 187 x 32 cm Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea “Filippo de Pisis,” inv. 6106 The partnership between politics and art promoted by Fascism to strengthen its consensus culminated in the 1930s with the great season of monumental art. The vast construction and urban planning activity undertaken by the regime offered artists and architects the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a new public art that would help redesign the nation’s collective imagination. Sculpture and mural painting thus recovered a social and pedagogical function, overcoming the private dimension of collecting and the celebratory purposes of monuments. Minerbi demonstrated an early awareness of the collective role of art. A sculptor admired by Gabriele d’Annunzio, he was the author of such highly successful monuments as the Victory of the Piave (Guoggiono 1924, Ferrara 1928, Gardone Riviera 1935) and the Monument to the Physician Who Fell in War (Florence 1924). In 1930 he was commissioned a monument for the atrium of the Obstetrical Gynecological Clinic named after Luigi Mangiagalli, and the sculptor set aside the traditional iconography of the portrait of the doctor required by the commission, favoring a representation with a strong social value: he depicted in bas-relief the scene of a childbirth exalting at the same time, the salvific and compassionate role of obstetrics and the theme of motherhood that embodied the cornerstone of the patriarchal family and one of the ideological assumptions of the regimes. The fortune of this work prompted Minerbi to repeat the installation in the monument to Carlo Forlanini, as evidenced by a sketch preserved at the museum. The plaster cast of the Maternity, restored in 2023 thanks to a grant from the Emilia-Romagna Region, testifies to the evolution of a recurring theme in Minerbi’s work. Within a rectangular frame we witness the birth of a baby tenderly cared for by two midwives while the mother, exhausted after childbirth, rests. Behind the apparent spontaneity of the depiction, however, are references to the history of painting, from the Renaissance frescoes of Ghirlandaio and Andrea del Sarto to the recent motherhood of the return to odine. Minerbi himself, in a 1930 letter to Clinical Institutes President Luigi Mangiagalli, emphasized, “My art, always the result of meditation, has only the appearances of the real. Instead, it is in essence an ‘ideal truth,’ far removed from the flesh that is disintegration. Without wanting to make a pun, I could say that my “true” is always “allegorical,” and my allegory is always seen and enjoyed from the true.”