Carlo Maria Mariani

In the great return of Italian artists and others to figurative art, the classical and academic tradition that has been becoming increasingly evident for about half a century, the art of Carlo Maria Mariani stands out because it offers a clear, cheerful and often ironic vision of his own ideals. 

Mariani's pictorial language is firmly rooted in Neoclassicism, which in turn has already assimilated the Grecomania, the veneration of Raphael as the best painter of all time, and the statuary paradigm for depicting the human body in the two-dimensional representation.

The catalogue of the exhibition at Palazzo Pitti in Florence, published in Italian and English, not only illustrates a corpus of 16 fundamental artworks by the Roman artist, but also includes four important essays by David Ebony, Antonio Martino, Francis M. Naumann and Vittorio Sgarbi, as well as an extensive introduction by Eike D. Schmidt.