Flavio Costantini biography

- FLAVIO COSTANTINI PAINTER

 

Flavio Costantini was an Italian painter and illustrator. He was born in Rome on September 21, 1926.

After graduating as a Long Course Captain, he served in the Navy and from 1951 to 1954 sailed with the Merchant Navy. During this period, he became passionate about Franz Kafka and began illustrating some of his novels.

Having permanently landed, he settles in Rapallo with his family and begins designing and drawing fabrics in Santa Margherita Ligure. Later, he starts collaborating with the graphic studio Firma in Genoa and creates illustrations for the corporate magazines of Shell, Esso, and Italsider.

In 1959, after a trip to Spain, he created a series of oil paintings on canvas dedicated to tauromachy. Flavio Costantini was self-taught and throughout his artistic career, he avoided any association with artistic currents and movements. Between 1963 and 1979, he executed around sixty tempera paintings dedicated to the history of anarchism, particularly focusing on the major attacks carried out in Italy, France, Spain, and the United States.

In 1978, he illustrated the volume Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis for the non-commercial gift editions of Olivetti, curated by Giorgio Soavi.

In 1980, he began creating the first in a long series of tempera and collage portraits of writers and philosophers, returning to his original source of inspiration, namely literature.

During this period, he regularly creates illustrations for Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Panorama, L’Espresso, and other national publications.

From 1982 onwards, he dedicated himself to producing various cycles of works, from the killing of the Romanovs, to the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic, up to one of his latest research themes on the events and protagonists of the French Revolution. In 1986, he exhibited at the XLII Venice Biennale, Art and Alchemy, curated by Arturo Schwarz. 

Flavio Costantini dies in Genoa on May 20, 2013.