Lino Bianchi Barriviera biography
Lino Bianchi Barriviera
Lino Bianchi Barriviera was an important Italian painter, draftsman, and engraver of the twentieth-century scene, appreciated and admired worldwide and placed by international critics among the best masters in the use of etching, a technique characteristic of his works.
Born in Montebelluna in the province of Treviso in 1906, he was guided towards technical studies by his family, while simultaneously nurturing his passion for art, which led him to start engraving at a very young age and to take part in numerous group exhibitions that earned him esteem and admiration from the artistic world.
In the mid-1920s, Lino Bianchi Barriviera made his first engraving in Florence, at the studio of Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona, which he frequented regularly, while at the end of the 1920s he organized his first exhibitions, coinciding with the years of fascism.
In 1927 he undertook his first trip to Libya, commissioned by the Italian government, which sent him to the African territory to study the architecture of monuments and analyze the local culture. Upon returning to Italy, he moved to Venice, where he attended as a guest the Academy of Fine Arts, then settled in Rome with his family in 1934. From here he began his academic career, being assigned the position of lecturer at the School of Fine Arts of Naples, where he took the chair of engraving.
The world of engravings is undoubtedly what most characterized the artistic life of Lino Bianchi Barriviera. Consider that from his second trip to Libya, which took place in 1937, came a work of thirteen engravings, and a few years later, during a mission in Ethiopia, where he assisted the studies of the archaeologist Monti Della Corte, he developed a complete cycle of engravings dedicated to the reliefs of the twelve churches of Lalibela. His complete collection of engravings boasts more than 950 plates, for which the painter mainly used the etching technique. It must be said that the artist loved to depict in his works the places he visited or lived in. In fact, many of his engravings are dedicated to the places of his childhood, in Veneto, but also to the destinations of his travels and the cities where he later lived.
In the 1930s, Lino Bianchi Barriviera participated in several internationally significant exhibitions, such as those in Munich in 1934, Budapest in '36, and Paris in '37. In these same years, he won numerous awards and tributes and started a series of solo exhibitions in Italy, such as those in Rome, Trieste, and Turin. In the 1940s, he joined the group of "War Painters" and in 1956 obtained the chair of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, where he taught until 1976. In the last years of his life, the great "master of engravings" dedicated himself to writing a manual to pass on his artistic techniques, titled "Engraving and Original Printing" published by the Neri Pozza publishing house in 1984.
Lino Bianchi Barriviera died in Acilia in 1985, but his works will always keep alive the memory of his great artistic talent in engraving and in various other forms of art such as oil painting, decorations, frescoes, wood, glass and ceramic work, and even jewelry creation.