Signature and dated lower right 1956.

Provenance: Virginia Giacometti Collection, Italy.

Publication: Plamena Dimitrova Racheva, Boris Georgiev of Varna, Ed. Kibea, pp. 96 e 140.

This is the one of the later version of the painted portrait of the renowned Italian sculptor Angelo Zanelli, created as a sign of lasting friendship. In the catalogue to his Milan exhibition, Boris Georgiev wrote: "The great Italian sculptor who created in Rome a large and important monument, "The Altar of Fatherland".
Georgiev has followed the traditions of Italian Renaissance portraits in order to express his sculptor's hands and face. In the portrait, Zanelli is working on a large slab of marble, and dozens of figures from the monument can be seen in the background.The subject emanates the spirituality and inner power of a person who, like Georgiev, has conquered matter and has transformed it according to his will and artistic concept. The portrait can be interpreted as the revelation of spiritual life and creative talent through art itself. The renowned critic Pietro Scarpa describes Boris Georgiev's Italian portraits as especially interesting because of their "fusco buono" technique and because of their continuation of the Renaissance tradition of linking image and background in a compositional construction that creates the illusion of space. Georgiev's overall technique was different and unique because it combined a number of techniques: gouache, water colours, tempera, colour pencils and a special primer.
"This talented artist, who is able to catch all constructive details in the faces, uses only those he deems the most necessary. In the superb analyses he makes of his portrait subjects, he refrains from burdening the faces with needless features. Moreover, he knows how to convey the emotions which make one model different from another".
The friendship between Georgiev and Zanelli, two great artists and personalities, left its mark for eternity.
In Florence, the marble tombstone of the artist and his sister Katya features a relief of Georgiev's "Weltschmerz" engraved by his friend, the sculptor Zanelli.