Leoncillo. L’antico

Conceived as a real ‘solo’, the exhibition is the first in an Italian museum dedicated to investigating the deep relationships that Leoncillo had with the ancient, archaic and classical, as well as with the great masters of the Renaissance and Baroque, throughout its thirty years of activity (1938-1968)

The exhibited works, about thirty sculptures, panels and papers, highlight the continuity of gaze that runs through the entire work, beyond the more traditional classifications based solely on stylistic criteria: in fact, from the hybrid and monstrous beings of 1939 until the last and celebrated decade in which the experience of matter triumphs, through the neocubist season (1946-1955).

Leoncillo never renounces to articulate an intimate and demanding comparison with the great past of sculpture, not only to restore dignity to his chosen material, ceramics, generally reduced to a simple instrument for craftsmen, but implicitly placing himself on the same level as the masters and of the artistic civilizations that preceded him in the face of the same privileged subject, man, and the same drama: suffering and death. Proof of this is the presence of one of Leoncillo’s most famous works in the rooms of the Archaeological Museum, among ancient sarcophagi from the Etruscan era.