Youth

Signed on the base: ‘Del Bo’; inscribed on the front: “Giovinezza”

Exhibitions: Venice Biennale 1920, p. 57, no. 12

“An artist who presents himself with two small, finished and persuasive marbles is Romolo Del Bo. His firm-headed Youth, with its laughing expression, seems the dream of a cheerful and fortunate poet. The marble has shrunk docilely, smooth as the petals of certain flowers; the female breast vibrates, shivers with joy, swollen and well composed” .
With these words, Francesco Sapori described in 1920, in the pages of ‘Emporium’, the bust Giovinezza by Romolo del Bo, exhibited, together with the sculpture Allo specchio, at the 12th Venice Biennale, highlighting the harmony of the surfaces, the delicate chiaroscuro passages, the freshness of the theme and the pure, almost ascetic and incorporeal tension that is a constant substratum of his works.
A clean and luminous bust, with a fine engraving on the base, in which the need for formal simplification becomes ever stronger, with just a few lines defining the figure and tracing with extreme delicacy the allegory of youth, which is embodied not only in the epidermal floridity of the surfaces, but also in the jovial face surrounded by a solid cap of gathered hair.
The mixture of classical composure and modernity of rhythmic rendering make this marble a sign of Del Bo’s approach to the instances of a return to order, without, however, ever completely renouncing that hint of polished symbolism inherited from Adolfo Wildt, studded with filiform and graceful figures that represent the union of certain reminiscences of late 19th-century Lombard verism and the new trends in which formal synthesis and spiritual elaboration are witnessed.
On the one hand, youth, the springtime of beauty, prefigures the decorative and light brio of the 1920s and, on the other hand, cannot but reveal the melancholy that lurks in the same decade, often referred to as the ‘age of uncertainty’, between moments of roaring glitter and as many of hinted restlessness. A topos that recurs in the classical iconographies of vanitas, where usually the personification of youth jealously holds back Time, because it begins to feel the effects of fleeting moments. “How beautiful is youth that nevertheless flees! Chi vuol esser lieto sia, di doman non c’è certezza’ seem to summarise the luxuriant features of the young woman sculpted by Del Bo: without hesitation, like a classical Hebe, she shows her breasts explicitly highlighted by her tapered fingers, a symbol of that harmonious yet ephemeral splendour, “skilful softness of form, harmony of lines, poetry of melancholic accents”. a hymn to youth and an exhortation to fully enjoy the pleasures of life (beauty, love, the senses) in the knowledge of their fleetingness.