Renato Natali

A pupil of the Accademia in Florence, he is one of the most promising young Tuscan sculptors. He has executed many portraits for the best of Florentine society. Many times the press has covered his works, in which he searches for form, resemblance and harmony of lines with beautiful elegance. He was born in Florence on 17 October 1884.This pure-blooded Livornese is not really an academic. All artists have had at least the facsimile of a master.

Renato Natali has never had masters. It was instinct that, after forcing him to paint, also taught him all the secrets of art or, to repeat a favourite term of his, of the trade. He was born a painter and a painter in the truest sense of the word, even if some of his critics, going in search of the source of his inspiration, have deluded themselves into thinking that they would find it if not outside painting, at least on the borderline between painting and literature.

He is an illustrator of life in Livorno and especially of nightlife: he prefers drama to idyll, however. His most significant works all belong to what he calls the ‘Leghorn cycle’, depicting the most characteristic environments of his native city. Certain of his ‘fights’ have earned him a well-deserved notoriety: bizarre and fantastic lighting; violent, almost brutal contrasts of colour; strange plays of shadow; groups of figures wonderfully alive and confused in fierce melees and, as a backdrop, some streets of old Livorno.

But the secret of this art, rude impetuous and instinctive, lies not only in the intensely dramatic sensations it manages to give, but also in the line according to which each painting appears solidly constructed and in the harmony that regulates and blends so much strength and vivacity of contrasts. He belongs to the ‘Labronico Group’.