Giulio Aristide Sartorio

Giulio Aristide Sartorio (born February 11, 1860 in Rome , † October 3, 1932 there ) was an Italian painter, illustrator, screenwriter and film director.

Sartorio came from a family of artists. His grandfather Girolamo had specialized in copying ancient statues in Rome, and both his father Raffaele Sartorio and his uncle were sculptors. His painting talent was developed within the family, and in 1876 he attended sporadic courses at the Accademia di San Luca and by Francesco Pedesti . He then worked for the Roman studio of Luis Álvarez Catalá , who was very successful with paintings in the Spanish style. This enabled him to open his own studio in 1871.

From 1882 he worked for Cronaca bizantina , directed by Antonio Sommaruga , where Gabriele D'Annunzio , Edoardo Scarfoglio , Giosuè Carducci and Francesco Paolo Michetti published, among others . At the International Art Exhibition in Rome in 1883 he became known to art critics and the public with his painting Malaria . In 1884 he traveled to France to study the decorations from the 18th century in Fontainebleau and Versailles.

The second half of the 1880s was marked by a rich artistic production. During this time he also met the Spanish painter José Villagas Cordero , who campaigned for his work, and D'Annunzio, with whom he published the illustrated edition of Isaotta Guttadauro in 1886 . In 1887 he met the architect Ernesto Basile , who was planning a villa that was decorated by Sartorio in 1890.

With I figli di Caino he took part in the Paris World Exhibition and was awarded a gold medal together with Giovanni Segantini . The painting, on which he had worked for three years, was later divided into four parts by him, one of which was lost, the others are in private ownership or in the possession of the Istituto Romano di S. Michele .

In 1889 he met the photographer, patron and art collector Count Giuseppe Primoli , who commissioned him with the triptych Le vergini savie e le vergini folli . In the early 1890s he took part in several art exhibitions in Rome, Paris, London and Berlin. During a trip to England from 1893-94 he got to know the works of the English landscape painters and Praeraffaelites and met Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Charles Fairfax Murray . At the first Venice Biennale in 1885, he presented the painting La Madonna degli angeli .

From 1896 to 1899 Sartorio taught at the art school in Weimar on the mediation of the writer Richard Voss . During this time, in addition to landscape and animal studies, he created the diptych La Gorgone e gli eroi and Diana d'Efeso e gli schiavi , which had great success at the Venice Biennials in 1897 and again in 1899. In 1900 he took part again in the World Exhibition in Paris , in 1901 in the Venice Biennale, and in 1902 he was appointed a member of the Accademia di San Luca .

The works from the first decade of the 20th century included several wall decorations, for example for the Latium Hall at the Venice Biennale in 1903, the Italian pavilion at the World Exhibition of Saint Louis in 1904, the art exhibition in Milan and the Casa del popolo in Rome 1906 and the Venice Biennale in 1907. In 1908 he was commissioned for an allegorical frieze as part of the redesign of the Palazzo Montecitorio by Ernesto Basile . An exhibition in Monaco was dedicated to him in 1913, and his work was shown in a separate room at the Venice Biennale the following year.

In 1915 Sartorio volunteered as a war volunteer, was almost immediately wounded in the Isonzo battles and captured and brought to Mauthausen. At the mediation of Pope Benedict XV. he was released in 1917, returned to the front as a war painter and was wounded again in 1918. Using photographs, he created numerous battle scenes during this time.

In 1918 he married the actress Marga Sevilla after a failed marriage with the Frankfurt painter Julia Bonn . With her he shot the experimental film Il misterio di Galatea from 1918-19, which was originally intended for private use . He was also a screenwriter and director for the films Il Sacco di Roma (1920) and San Giorgio .

In the last years of his life, Sartorio made numerous trips. As early as 1919 he was in Egypt at the invitation of Fu'ad I and also visited Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria. As government commissioner for the fine arts, he rode to South America in 1924. He visited Japan in 1928 and took a Mediterranean cruise in 1929. Major personal exhibitions were dedicated to him in Milan (1921), New York (1926, 1927 and 1931) and Rome (1931). In 1929 he became a member of the Accademia d'Italia . His last works were sketches for a mosaic decoration of the Cathedral of Messina, which however was never realized.

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• Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Sartorio, Giulio Aristide
• Giulio Aristide Sartorio in the Internet Movie Database (English)