PALAZZO LOMBARDIA · MILAN

This is the largest painting in the collection on display inside the Spazio Fiume at Palazzo Lombardia. It is a tribute to the Italian genius through the representation of many protagonists of Italian history (some of them recognizable, like Dante, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Garibaldi). Behind them a huge crowd of famous yet unidentifiable personalities extends whose names are listed in a very thick caption on the bottom edge of the painting.

Having trained himself at the great school of the XV Century Italian portraitists and being a great admirer of portraitist Goya, Fiume started very young to carry out portraits of family and friends, first in drawing and later in painting, to continue with historical figures as well as with eminent contemporary figures of culture and entertainment. In 1989 he also created a whole cycle of portraits called My Imaginary Ancestors. In 1973 Fiume painted the African Mona Lisa, now in the Vatican Museums. This painting, together with his successive Japanese Mona Lisa is another tribute by Fiume to Leonardo da Vinci.

This painting does not fall among the most recurrent subjects of Fiume’s, nor does it belong to any of the various cycles he completed during his long career. It is rather a proof of technical skill in which Fiume enjoyed himself in showing how effortlessly he was capable of overcoming difficulties of composition and perspective in the manner of his famous colleagues of the past.

This cycle is represented here by a painting carried out by Fiume with his daughter Laura, also a painter, portrayed with her two dogs and her beloved kitten Purù.

This painting belongs to Fiume’s Tributes to Goya and portrays the Spanish Royal Family standing beside Goya’s famous Maya Desnuda.

Fiume’s production of religious works is represented here by this large crucifixion interpreted with an extraordinary expressive freedom.

Although he kept himself within the sphere of a substantially Figurative iconography, Fiume also wanted to express himself through more geometrical forms, of Picassian inspiration. Drawings and paintings encompassing various themes such as Wrestling Dragons, Flower Vases, Models, and even religious themes like Christus Vincit and Ulysses and the Sirens were included in that unusual experience.

This large painting full with characters is a tribute to the Opera theatre. Among those characters soprano Maria Callas can be seen standing on the right in a light blue gown. On this overcrowded stage Fiume placed himself, seated on the steps in an armour, and his family: on the right, above the drawing of a man, his son Luciano. In the middle his wife and her three sisters, and to the right his daughter Laura, still a child, next to some of her little drawings.

Fresco painting was one of the most hidden aspects of Fiume’s nature as an artist. In fact, he would have preferred to have lived at the time when painters earned their living by frescoing tombs, churches, and palaces. That tradition being extinguished, Fiume painted his frescoes on large rectangular portions of plaster enclosed by a frame like in the case of this City of Statues.

The image of the cock, a symbol of virility, appears in many of Fiume’s bronze sculptures as well as in his architectural projects, drawings, and paintings. Fiume had two sculptures made in wicker, after his own sketches, by the Vittorio Bonacina laboratory of Lurago d’Erba: the Warrior and the Cock, both in 1949. The latter, the larger one, was exhibited a the Triennial of Milan in 1991.