Luigi Carrubba

LUIGI CARRUBBA (Tunis, 1907 - ?).
"Diana the Huntress", ca. 1937.
Bronze with black patina.
Signed on the base: "Carrubba Luigi Roma Febbraio XV".
Bibliography: E. Zorzi, Uno sguardo d'insieme alla XXI Biennale d'Arte di Venezia, in "Le vie d'Italia turismo nazionale, movimento dei forestieri, prodotto italiano", XLIV, 6, 1938, p. 750.
Measurements: 108 x 100 x 47 cm.

Luigi Carrubba, sculptor born in Tunisia in 1907 and Roman by adoption, is part of that generation of artists that reached its consolidation at the end of the 1930s, at the height of the exhibitions promoted by the Fascist Union of Fine Arts. For a long time relegated by historiography, these exhibitions were in fact an effective instrument for the promotion and diffusion of Italian art, covering sculpture, painting and decorative arts. Over the years, their cultural and political relevance has been reconsidered as a fundamental way to understand the complex circulation of the arts during the regime, as well as to recover the figure of sculptors and painters who, pigeonholed as "artists of the regime", actually possessed a broader and deeper artistic value.

The work of Luigi Carrubba, author of bas-reliefs and sculptures of remarkable quality and format, presented both at the Syndicate Exhibitions and later at the Venice Biennials, is placed in this context. At the 1936 Lazio Fine Arts Syndicate Exhibition he exhibited a Portrait, and in 1937 he presented the sculpture The Hunt, which could be identified with the work analyzed here, given the thematic and chronological coincidence.

The artist's signature is engraved on the base next to the inscription "Carrubba Luigi Roma Febbraio XV". This dating responds to the calendar of the Fascist era, which counts the years from the March on Rome in 1922; thus, the year XV corresponds to 1937, the date on which the work was exhibited at the Lazio Union Exhibition. That same year, Carrubba presented a bas-relief with a similar theme at the National Exhibition of the Fascist Union of Naples: a hunting procession of archaic character, stylistically close in the representation of human figures and dogs.

In the present sculpture, the female figure -identifiable with Diana the hunter-, with a slender and firm anatomy, barely covered by a simple tunic, has just shot an arrow towards her prey. Next to her, a greyhound with long limbs projects itself in an elegant leap, describing a dynamic curve with its paws in the race to retrieve it.

The vibrant surfaces and stylized bodies are organized in dynamic lines that refer to a synthetic primitivism in the treatment of facial features and volumes. This formal language has an affinity with other works of similar subject matter presented at the same trade union exhibitions that year by sculptors such as Benedetto De Lisi and Guido Galletti.

An iconography, that of Diana the huntress, particularly dear to the Italic and Latin narrative of the regime as an ideal continuation of the Roman Empire, akin to the natural, instinctive, primitive and wild conception of the Italian land. Other works presented by Luigi Carrubba at the Venice Biennials of 1938 and 1940, the bas-relief entitled Maternità (Maternity) and Assistenza all'infanzia (Assistance to Infancy) and the allegorical plaster sculpture L'estate (Summer), are part of this context. At the 1938 Biennale he was one of the young winners of the bas-relief competition for the Italian pavilion: "The place of honor in those central halls [of the Venice Biennale], which are the heart of the Palazzo dell'Italia and of the Biennale, was not devoted to the exhibitions of the most famous artists, but to the works of a solid group of young painters, sculptors and engravers, winners of a series of competitions held by the Presidency of the Exhibition among all Italian artists, for compositions in fresco and bas-relief, inspired by events or aspects of modern Italian life [...]. The compositions by Teofilo Raggio, Mirko Vucetich, Luigi Carrubba, Carlo Pini and Giuseppe Virgili are dedicated to the Maternity [...]".