In 2022, the city of Rome hosted a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Francesco Messina at Villa Torlonia. Titled Francesco Messina. Novecento Contemporaneo, the show brought together 81 works—bronzes, terracottas, and plaster casts—selected largely from the artist’s own studio museum in Milan. The exhibition aimed to reexamine Messina’s long career, which spanned much of the 20th century and reflected a sustained engagement with figuration and classical form. Messina was born in...
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In 2022, the city of Rome hosted a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Francesco Messina at Villa Torlonia. Titled Francesco Messina. Novecento Contemporaneo, the show brought together 81 works—bronzes, terracottas, and plaster casts—selected largely from the artist’s own studio museum in Milan. The exhibition aimed to reexamine Messina’s long career, which spanned much of the 20th century and reflected a sustained engagement with figuration and classical form.
Messina was born in 1900 in Linguaglossa, a town on the slopes of Mount Etna, and moved to Milan at a young age. He rose quickly in Italy’s artistic institutions, becoming director of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. Throughout his career, he completed numerous public commissions, including the Monument to Pope Pius XII in St. Peter’s Basilica and the well-known bronze horse sculpture installed in front of RAI’s Rome headquarters in 1966.
Less discussed, but no less central to his practice, was his work as an illustrator. Messina produced a steady stream of drawings and graphic works throughout his life, some of which were reproduced in books and periodicals, others kept within his studio. He illustrated classical texts, sacred subjects, and poems—often in pencil, ink, or sanguine—translating his sculptural understanding of form into two-dimensional studies of tension and repose. These illustrations were not preparatory sketches but stand-alone works that revealed another facet of his discipline: clarity of line, restraint in gesture, and an instinct for compression.
One notable example is his suite of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, produced in the 1960s. The drawings are not grand or theatrical, but quiet and internal—figures turned inward, volumes hinted at rather than filled in. The same sensibility can be seen in his depictions of horses, bathers, and saints: stripped of material weight but still anchored by anatomical logic. As with his sculpture, these works resist flourish in favor of structure.
Francesco Messina
He was also highly selective. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Messina resisted gallery circuits and avoided aligning himself with any ideological art movement. In interviews, he spoke of sculpture in mechanical and bodily terms. “The material contains its own law,” he said in a 1973 televised conversation. “I work until the form is self-evident. That doesn’t require a manifesto.” While his language was pragmatic, the process he described was rigorous—long hours in the studio, anatomical modeling, and attention to the mechanical balance of mass and gesture.
Commercially, Messina’s career occupied a hybrid space: he accepted commissions from the Church and state, but also contributed portraits to cultural publications and small editions of illustrated books. His graphic works were rarely treated as separate from his sculpture; for him, drawing was a way to think through material, often faster and more freely than plaster or bronze allowed. Still, many of the works stand alone, collected privately or occasionally shown in print-focused exhibitions.
Today, the Studio Museo Francesco Messina continues to house his sculptures and drawings in a former Baroque church in central Milan. Many of the works were chosen by Messina himself in the 1970s. The museum remains both archive and workspace, housing notebooks, maquettes, and hundreds of works on paper that offer a fuller, quieter portrait of a figure best known for bronze.
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