Mario Pinton Biography
Mario Pinton was born in Padua in 1919 and was introduced to the art of metalworking from a young age at his father's school. He attended art schools in Padua, Venice and Milan. His activity has developed in the goldsmith's art of jewels and medals, in the production of artistic artefacts, in plastic and pictorial art of a celebratory, courtly and sacred nature, for public and private commissions, also extending to external environmental artistic interventions. This activity was incessantly integrated with teaching and research: he was a teacher of metal art and goldsmithing at the art institutes of Padua and Venice; director of the Art Institute of Padua, Este and Cittadella; director of the Higher Institute of Artistic Industries of Urbino. Together with other important personalities from the world of European art and goldsmithing, Pinton was able, after the Second World War, to bring about a radical revolution in the language of jewellery, which was no longer conceived only as an ornamental object, but as a true artistic product. His jewels from the fifties, in contrast with the predominant abstractionism, evoke a classicism which is expressed in the iconographic and figurative choices and in the lightness of skilfully engraved and worked plates, which recall the charm of Greek, Etruscan and Roman jewellery, with subjects animals and plants of extraordinary workmanship. Pinton approached abstractionism slowly, from the sixties, making the signs more and more essential and further lightening the touch and quantity of material, in a process of reduction aimed at lightness and ethereality: most of his works do not exceed 18-20 grams of weight.
