Roman with Range

Italy's sculpture is in the midst of a postFascist renaissance. Milan boasts two sculptors good enough to rival any now living: Giacomo Manzu (TIME, Sept. 25) and Marino Marini (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950). Rome has 37-year-old Pericle Fazzini, who is every bit as able. Last week Rome honored its own with a big Fazzini exhibition in the Barberini Palace.

The show pointed up Fazzini's great range. He is equally at home carving realistic portrait busts and academic church images, or turning out expressionistic figures cruelly twisted for dramatic effect.

The portraits are generally of Fazzini's friends, carved as gifts to the sitter. Unflattering, they have some of the force and bite of the best old Roman busts. His apparent method is to catch a friend's fleeting but typical expression, as the camera can, and emphasize it almost to the point of caricature.

His church images are weaker, interesting chiefly for their elegance. Done on commission, they are Fazzini's livelihood.

His expressionistic sculptures Fazzini carves for glory; they sell badly. Some are more than half abstract, and Fazzini's bullying of the body into geometrical shapes can be hard to take. But Fazzini uses his freedom with figures to make them look alive from every angle. They seem to be in motion, often have the fiery spiral lift that Michelangelo, with infinitely greater subtlety, achieved. "The body in sculpture," Fazzini says, "is not something that breathes air as I breathe. It must live by itself, outside of physical death."

The son of a cabinetmaker, Fazzini carved furniture in his father's workshop as a boy. At 16, he began studying sculpture, earned a four-year government scholarship almost at once. Married, he avoids company, spends long days alone in his cluttered studio off the Via Margutta (Rome's Greenwich Village), chain-smoking, pondering, taking up the chisel only at moments when he feels sure.

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