Alberto Martini

Alberto Martini (November 24, 1876 – November 8, 1954) was an Italian painter, engraver, illustrator and graphic designer. Critics have described Martini's range of work from "elegant and epic" to "grotesque and macabre" and consider him one of the precursors of Surrealism.

Martini was born in Oderzo, Veneto and received his early training in drawing and painting from his father, who was a portrait painter and a professor of drawing at the Istituto Technico in Treviso.

Much of his career was spent illustrating famous literary works. In 1895 he began the first series of illustrations for Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore and for Alessandro Tassoni's La secchia rapita. During this time he had his first exhibit which was a series of fourteen paintings from the anthology La corte dei miracoli at the Venice Biennale in 1897, where his drawings of beggars were described as "picturesquely grotesque". In 1898 he moved to Monaco and worked as an illustrator for the magazines Dekorative Kunst and "Jugend". In 1901 he illustrated an edition of La Divina Commedia. Beginning in July 1905, he produced 132 ink illustrations, which were described as "macabre", for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe which he worked on until 1909 and "inaugurated a period of great creative intensity within the graphics of literary inspiration." His work was clearly influenced by such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Urs Graf, Pieter Bruegel, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Joseph Sattler whose work he had studied.

In 1907, he had his first solo show in London and met the publisher William Heinemann who went on to use some of Martini's illustrations. The death of his father in 1910, brought him back to Italy where he moved with his mother to a country home near Treviso. There he continued to illustrate great literary works such as Shakespeare's Hamlet and poems for Paul Verlaine. From 1915 to 1920 he devoted time to painting, mostly pastels, in the theme of woman-butterfly and did a series of "elegant" lithographs titled Farfalle (Butterflies) which were good examples of his proto-Surrealism.

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