Luigi Zago Biography
Luigi Zago (Villafranca di Verona, 1894 – Mendoza, 1952) was an Italian painter, he began painting at a very young age as a self-taught artist and only later, in 1924, was he a pupil of Vettore Zanetti Zilla. His passion for painting was initially interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, as Luigi Zago fought as an Alpino from 1915 to 1918. In 1924 his first exhibition took place at the Lyceum in Milan and immediately attracted the attention of critics and artists including Carlo Carrà. In 1925 he achieved his first successes at the Rome Biennale and continued exhibiting at the Turin Quadrennial and in other important exhibitions in Milan, Florence, Bologna and Fiume. In 1926, for the Franciscan Centenary he painted eighty works representing the places of Saint Francis of Assisi and these paintings, of great artistic, poetic and religious value, were published in the three volumes of the "Franciscan Sanctuaries" by Father Vittorino Facchinetti entitled respectively " Assisi", "La Verna nel Casentino" and "Valle Reatina". He then painted another series of fifty works inspired by the places and atmospheres of Manzoni's The Betrothed, following the paths traveled by Don Abbondio, the houses scattered across the countryside and the views of Pescarenico. In 1928, the tenth anniversary of the Victory of the First World War, the Micheli Gallery in Milan invited him to set up a personal exhibition in its spaces with a series of works that had war locations as their subject and in the same year he was awarded the Rotary Club Award of Bergamo. In Rome, in 1932, with the patronage of the Ministry of War, he inaugurated his exhibition with a series of paintings that had the high mountains as their subject. Also in 1928 he participated in the Venice Biennale with two works: “La Fonte” and “Window ”. For the twentieth anniversary of the Victory he returned to the places where he had fought, retracing them on foot for several months. He then painted an important group of works which were exhibited in Milan in the "Battlefields Exhibition - from Timavo to Adamello". His works painted with passion and awareness were well received by the public and critics who defined him as the painter of visions of peace in places of war. In 1929 he obtained the 1st Prize at the Baveno Landscape Exhibition and in 1942 the 1st Prize at the Milan trade union with the painting "Alto Lago di Como", later purchased by the Province of Milan. New exhibitions followed in Biella, Milan, Bergamo and Como. In 1946 he achieved 1st Prize at the “Mostra del Mare” in San Remo. In 1943 a bomb hit his studio in Milan and destroyed most of the canvases painted up to that point and Luigi Zago immediately afterwards organized an exhibition with the paintings that they suffered no damage. In 1947 his wife Magda Martinelli left for South America, bringing with her numerous works by Luigi Zago, presenting them in museums and art galleries. In 1949 Luigi Zago accepted the invitation of the Argentine authorities to move to Buenos Aires, already starting on the ship to paint a series of travel impressions which he presented as soon as he disembarked. Here too he achieved numerous critical and public successes and his exhibitions followed one another in Argentina in Rosario, Mendoza, Cordoba and in Punta del Este and Motevideo in Uruguay. The Government of the Province of Cordoba commissioned him fifty canvases with the subject of the city and the landscapes of the area, all works which were then published in the catalog "Cordoba y sus Sierras en su poetry de colores" a publication of fifty color plates in memory of that impressive landscape painting work. After the exhibition in Cordoba, the Government of the Province of Misiones invited him to move to Posadas, the capital of that state, but before leaving, on 8 July 1952, the artist suddenly died. In August 1952 the Muller Gallery in Buenos Aires organized a major exhibition of Luigi Zago. His works are also preserved in the Musei de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in the Museo Juan B. Castagnino in Rosario de Santa Fe, in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valparaiso in Chile and in many other public and private collections and art galleries in Cordoba, Rosario, Mendoza, Mar del Plata and Rio IV in Argentina and Santiago, Valparaiso and Vina del Mar in Chile. His works can be found in Italy in important collections of art institutes such as the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome , the Museum of the Risorgimento and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan, the Capitol Museum in Rome, the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, Modena, Novara, the Museum of the Villa Reale in Monza, the Gallery of Modern Art in Verona, the Municipal Art Gallery of Treviglio, the Palazzo Confalonieri in Merate, the Royal Gallery of London.
