Popes and Dancers With Sculptor and Illustrator Francesco Messina

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ROME—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—taken from the artist’s studio museum in Milan. The exhibition aimed to reexamine Messina’s long career, which spanned much of the 20th century.

Messina was born in 1900 in Linguaglossa, a town on the slopes of Mount Etna. He moved to Milan at a young age. Quickly, he rose in Italy’s artistic institutions, becoming director of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. Throughout his career, he completed numerous public commissions, one of which was the Monument to Pope Pius XII in St. Peter’s Basilica and another of which is 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...

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Less discussed, but no less central to his practice, was his work as an illustrator. Messina produced a stream of drawings and graphic works, some of which were reproduced in books and periodicals. Others, kept in his studio. He illustrated classical texts, sacred subjects, and poems—often in pencil or ink. These illustrations were not preparatory sketches but stand-alone works.

One example is his suite of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, produced in the 60s. The drawings are not grand or theatrical, but quiet and precious. The same sensibility can be seen in his depictions of horses, bathers, and saints: a kind of rough impression, still anchored by deep anatomical understanding.

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Messina resisted gallery circuits and avoided aligning himself with any ideological movements. 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.”

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. 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.