Salvatore Fancello

On view is a group of terracottas and polychrome ceramics articulated through Fancello’s distinctive bestiary. It was on the occasion of the major retrospective at Brera in 1942 that Giulio Carlo Argan wrote: “In art and poetry, the bestiary is metaphorical and carries its own moral; Fancello’s, more fable-like than didactic, is a transposition of the human into a register of gentle irony. Into it he poured an exuberant, celebratory imagination—like a prolonged childhood, as though he foresaw that maturity would never come. For this reason, as I have said, it is meaningless to imagine what his art might have become had he lived longer; to feel a deep sense of loss for Fancello, what little he accomplished is enough […] What a pity.”