LUCIANO MINGUZZI WORKS

Luciano Minguzzi, a renowned Italian sculptor and engraver, was born in Bologna in 1911. Raised under the artistic influence of his father Armando, also a sculptor, he developed a passion for art and began his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. There, he studied engraving with Giorgio Morandi and sculpture with Ercole Drei, and attended art history classes by Roberto Longhi at the University. Thanks to a scholarship, Luciano Minguzzi had the opportunity to stay in Paris and London, exhibiting for the first time in 1933. His works were well received, and at the Roman Quadrennial of 1943, he won his first prize. Other notable awards include the Angelicum of 1946 and first place ex aequo at the Biennale of 1950.
In the period immediately following World War II, Luciano Minguzzi created the Monument to the Partisan and the Partisan Woman for his hometown. This artwork, located at Porta Lame, commemorates an epic battle between Nazi-fascists and partisans that took place in 1944. Made from bronze melted down from an equestrian statue of Benito Mussolini, the monument depicts two young people, one of whom is armed, in a moment of great naturalness.
During the 1950s, he developed a more dramatic and expressionist style, producing a series of sculptures inspired by the prisoners of concentration camps and the anonymous victims of war. In 1953, he won the third prize in the competition for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner organized by the Tate Gallery in London.
In 1950, he won a competition for the creation of the Fifth Door of the Milan Cathedral, a project he completed in 1965. In 1962, he participated in the exhibition Sculptures in the City, organized by Giovanni Carandente in the context of the V Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. For the event, he presented a 1958 iron and bronze sculpture titled Pas-de-quatre. An important commission came in 1970 when he was entrusted with the creation of the Door of Good and Evil of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, a project to which he dedicated seven years of intense and passionate work.
In addition to sculpture, Luciano Minguzzi also dedicated himself to the art of medals, creating, for example, the 500 lire silver coin of San Marino in 1974. In 2012, on the occasion of the centenary of the artist's birth, a posthumous retrospective exhibition was set up in his honor in Bologna at the Fondazione del Monte. Luciano Minguzzi died in Milan in 2004, and today he rests in the family tomb at the Piratello cemetery in Imola. The art of Luciano Minguzzi continues to be celebrated for its powerful expression of humanity and for its profound sensitivity to the human condition.