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CESARE CRUGNI: FATHER OF SCULTOMAIEUTICA
by Antonino De Bono
Socratic school spoke to the pupils and to all the people who wanted to know more, teaching now to put truth into light, taken it from the inner of their own soul.
The philosopher loved comparing his method to the one of his mother Fenarete, a midwife, just to measure the ability of bringing to life the unborn children from the stomach of the pregnant women.
Cesare Crugni briefly learned the art of maieutica (from the Greek form “maieutiké téchne” as obstetrics) digging and moulding the marble from the inside, drawing the formal and spiritual quintessence.
This artist from Savona, knows perfectly the art of tondo, of bass-relief, of group composition, of embossed work and of high-relief. But his particular and original technique, consists of underlining into the inside of stone or marble blocks, human faces, imploring hands and arms, faces strictly surrounded by matter, all figures that, thanks to his keen chisel-working, he digs from the deep, bringing to light their own souls with energic power.
It is a titanic, colossal work, which forces the artist to give relief to thousand of particularities of the tragedy of the man, keeping it into its marble grave, as if the mortal was clung to his deadly prison, in the style of Dante.
A powerful allegory of the deep of the soul, of inscrutable meanness of the instinct, of the dead evil pond which links man to eternal and immortal sufferings.
For these reason the task of Cesare Crugni deals with the Socratic doctrine. In his dialogues, suggested by Plato, Socrates tended to the aim of discovering what is universal in all things.
The esthetic parallel fits perfectly because the sculptor wants to draw the essence of man (the concept of suffering or that of the drama in human condition), but is necessary to avoid the doubts of sophistical knowledge, topical question, and searching inside of oneself.
Is there in Crugni’s work a sort of demon like the Socratic one?
The answer is yes, only if we consider as a demon the interior voice which carries to the supreme good and the universal knowledge.
There are artist’s works which deserve to be put in a museum because they are rich in plastic existentialism: “Catarsi dell’uomo” (h.= cm. 85, white Carrara marble) pictures the faces of a man constricted between the bounds of stone, with the hands desperately towards the spasmodic search of freedom; “Oppresso da cemento” (h.= cm. 75 white botticino marble), the arm is buried, caged, covered by the landslide, the man languishes while searching for a delicate, fragile work which gives a surprising effect about the sweetness of the man is submission, talking to world to come.
The artist underlines the flight of shades intentionally placed between the eyelids of the face and the cut of the eye, he knows the sublime game of surfaces.
Cesare Crugni, father of Scultomaieutica.
Milan, 1979
Antonino De Bono
English translation by Tiziana Ciarlo
