Flavio Costantini biography

- FLAVIO COSTANTINI PAINTER

Flavio Costantini was a painter It is Italian illustrator. Born in Rome on 21 September 1926.

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

Landed permanently, he settled in Rapallo with his family and began designing and designing fabrics in Santa Margherita Ligure. Later he began to collaborate with the Firma graphic studio in Genoa and created the 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 tauromachia. Flavio Costantini is self-taught and in the course of his artistic activity he will shun any approach to artistic currents and movements. Between 1963 and 1979 he made about sixty temperas dedicated to 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 Heart of Edmondo De Amicis for the non-commercial 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, i.e. the literature.

In this period he permanently creates illustrations for the Corriere della Sera, The Republic, Panorama, The Espresso and other national newspapers.

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

Flavio Costantini died in Genoa on May 20, 2013.