Flavio Costantini biography

- FLAVIO COSTANTINI PAINTER

 

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

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

Having landed permanently, he settled in Rapallo with his family and began planning and designing fabrics in Santa Margherita Ligure. He later began to collaborate with the Firma graphic studio in Genoa and created illustrations for the company magazines of Shell, Esso and Italsider.

In 1959, after a trip to Spain, he created a series of oils on canvas dedicated to bullfighting . Flavio Costantini was self-taught and during his artistic activity he avoided any comparison with artistic currents and movements. Between 1963 and 1979 he executed around sixty tempera paintings dedicated to the history of anarchy and in particular to 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 out-of-commerce gift editions of Olivetti edited by Giorgio Soavi.

In 1980 he began to create the first of a long series of tempera portraits and collages of writers and philosophers, returning to his first source of inspiration: literature.

In this period he regularly created illustrations for Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Panorama, L'Espresso and other publications national.

From 1982 onwards he dedicated himself to producing various cycles of works, from the killing of the Romanov, to the sinking of the transatlantic Titanic up to one of his latest research topics 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 died in Genoa on 20 May 2013.