Background
Giacomo Manzoni was born on December 22, 1908 in Bergamo, Italy. His father was a shoemaker.
Giacomo Manzoni was born on December 22, 1908 in Bergamo, Italy. His father was a shoemaker.
Other than a few evening art classes, Giacomo was self-taught in sculpture, although he later became a professor himself.
After service in the Italian army from 1927 to 1928, Manzù went to Paris to try his luck as a sculptor, but after three weeks he collapsed from hunger and was deported back to Italy. He settled in Milan, and, after receiving a commission in 1929 to decorate a chapel at the Catholic University, he devoted himself to sculpting full time.
Manzù’s early works were nudes, portraits, and biblical subjects, executed in a style that at first was influenced by Etruscan, Egyptian, and medieval art. However, he soon adopted the Impressionist techniques of the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso. Manzù visited Rome in 1934, a trip that inspired him to concentrate on religious themes. In 1938 he sculpted the figure of a Roman Catholic cardinal, initiating a series of more than 50 seated or standing cardinals. He also sculpted many tender portrayals of female nudes. Manzù’s most noteworthy work of the war years was Francesca, a seated nude that won the Grand Prix of the Rome Quadriennale in 1942.
He was commissioned to create a set of monumental bronze doors for St. Peter’s in Rome. The portal was dedicated in 1964, after the death of Pope John XXIII whose official portrait Manzù had executed. Among his other commissions were doors for Salzburg Cathedral (1958), in Austria, and the Church of Sankt-Laurents in Rotterdam (1969), The Netherlands, and a relief, Mother and Child (1965), for Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Manzù died in Rome in 1991.
Manzù was a devout Catholic in service to the Pope.