Alberto Manfredi Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

One of the most refined painters and engravers of his generation, Alberto Manfredi (Reggio Emilia, 1930-2001) held the chair of Engraving Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence for many years. An artist of profound literary culture, he had graduated in Literature in Bologna, and in that city he had been able to meet, among others, Giorgio Morandi, of whom he painted several portraits. Read the full biography

Alberto Manfredi Biography

One of the most refined painters and engravers of his generation, Alberto Manfredi (Reggio Emilia, 1930-2001) held the chair of Engraving Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence for many years. An artist of profound literary culture, he had graduated in Literature in Bologna, and in that city he had been able to meet, among others, Giorgio Morandi, of whom he painted several portraits. Perhaps this characteristic has meant that his work has had many admirers also among those writers who are in turn particularly inclined to the world of art, such as Leonardo Sciascia, who wrote the preface to one of his print catalogues, Gesualdo Bufalino, Valerio Zurlini, Romano Bilenchi; and certainly his literary training, combined with his very precocious vocation as an engraver, contributed to directing him towards the livre d¹artiste: in fact there are over one hundred editions of works illustrated by him. His rich activity as an engraver, partially collected in four catalogs published by the main Italian print dealer of the twentieth century, Dino Prandi, also led him to approach less usual forms of artistic expression, such as the linoleum made for the wine labels of his friend Sergio Manetti. The salient characteristics of his graphic art are a precise, rigorous and sober language, which has always wanted to keep itself distant from fashions, seeking its own expressive reasons in itself and in its deep proto-twentieth-century roots (from Degas to Beckmann, from Modigliani to De Pisis). they are found in the same way in his painting, and it is certainly no coincidence that one of the protagonists of twentieth-century Italian art, Mino Maccari, wrote of him that he remained "among the few painters who still know how to draw". Numerous personal exhibitions, at the Galleria del Milione and at the Galleria Il Mappamondo in Milan, at the Galleria Pananti in Florence, at the Palace of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, at the Galleria Il Mappamondo in Milan, at the Bouquinerie de l'Institut in Paris, culminating in a few months before his death in a large anthological exhibition of over one hundred paintings organized at Palazzo Magnani in his city.