Late "Late Roman"

Italy's Milan is one of Europe's liveliest modern art centers. Last week it buzzed with news of an artist who was anything but modern. An inarticulate and now almost blind peasant carver named Alberto Sani, he seemed to have been born 16 centuries after his time.

As a soldier in a remote Alpine outpost during World War I, Sani had started whittling to while the time away. Afterward he found work at a rich artist's villa in the province of Siena. The artist gave Sani plenty of time off for sculpture, taught him to work in stone. Sani insists that today he still carves just "to pass the time and make some money for my wife." But his works, on exhibition in a Milan gallery last week, could stand comparison with the most sophisticated examples of modern Italian sculpture.

Whirling Couples. Sani carves what he knows best: country dances, boar hunts, pig auctions, cottage-building and chestnut-shelling. He once did some reliefs for a Via Crucis, but under pressure. "How can I carve such things," he grumbled, "when I've never seen them happen with my own eyes?"

His carvings of workaday subjects were both vigorous and elaborate. The dean of Renaissance art experts, Bernard Berenson, was instantly reminded, when he first saw them, of "the Early Christian sarcophagi that line the grand staircase of the Lateran Museum in Rome. The same stumpy, neckless bodies, with disproportionately big heads of late antique shape, the same crowding, the same . . . distribution of light and shade."

Writing in the Italian art review, Commentari, Berenson said that Sani's sculptures were not merely "like" the late Roman ones, they were just as good. In Sani's Rustic Dance, for example, "you get the bosses, the depth of shadow, the highly conventionalized foliage, the architecture, even, of a Third or Fourth Century sarcophagus. Looking attentively, you are amused to discover couples dancing in our own way and in our own clothes . . . One could fill pages pointing out the whirling couples, the musicians, the carousers admirably characterized each with his peculiar way of grasping, of moving, of conversing."

Long-Dead Worlds. Sani himself has no notion of what makes him carve as he does. "Something strange inside me makes me do it," is all he can say.

That something, Berenson thinks, is a spiritual affinity for a long-dead world. Artists, he writes, may sometimes "wake up in a world not their own . . . Many are . . . perchance Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Ostrogoths, Sarmatians, Bulgars or 'late Romans' as I believe Alberto Sani to be . . . Frequenting no schools, and unaffected by stale conventions as little as by those now cooking up, he remains a fascinating phenomenon, an artist, a real artist out of his time."

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