Alberto Martini (Oderzo 1876 - Milan 1954)

Alberto Martini was born in Oderzo (Treviso) in 1876. His father Giorgio Martini was a professor of drawing and his mother Maria dei Conti Spineda de’ Cattaneis was an aristocrat from the old nobility. It was his father who gave him his early training in graphic design. Subsequently he studied in Milan under the great German masters of engraving Dürer and Cranach and the late 19th century engravers W. Crane and G. Doré.
Averse to atmospheric and impressionist effects, he matured an original lithographic technique, producing delicate greys and elegant blacks, by using dense pen and ink dotting. A more macabre and morbid vein was to be found in his collection of watercolour and ink drawings entitled Albo della Morte, full of Nordic and Renaissance beauty.
In 1970 he was invited to London and, on this occasion, the editor W. Heinemann commissioned him to draw the illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and these were then shown at the Goupil Gallery. In 1914, once again at the Goupil Gallery, he exhibited six lithographs of the graphic poem I misteri which presented gloomy and dark symbolic evocations. In Milan in 1925 he married his favourite model, Maria Petringa, who was present in many of his works. In 1930 he produced graphic art inspired by the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and by Gerard de Nerval’s Aurélia, a work close to his own esoteric interests.
He was a precursor of Surrealism but he did not want to associate himself with this movement and he remained isolated, although he was particularly successful abroad, especially in London, Paris and in Germany. He died in Milan in 1954.