Renato Birolli

Renato Birolli was born in Verona in December 1905 and died in Milan in May 1959. During the 1930s and 1940s, the artist painted, experimenting and reflecting on the particular historical moment he was experiencing, producing some of the most beautiful images of that period in Italian art. “One of the first artists I approached,” says the collector, “I was drawn to his extreme love for life and work, which led him to look towards artists across the Alps, to travel, and to continually renew himself.” His art revolutionizes the traditional way of painting and lives in fairytale colors—a new way of seeing things and a new way of seeing Milan.

In the Iannaccone collection, there are nine works: Un Arlecchino, two urban landscapes, Taxi Rosso, the universe of the New Ecumene accompanied by the Poets, a black portrait of Mrs. Cavallo, the masks, and Il Caos. Birolli contrasts the statuary volumes of Mario Sironi, the quintessential Novecento artist so beloved by Margherita Sarfatti, with a world made up of pink sidewalks, the blue of streetlights, and the vibrant red of taxis. He himself notes in his notebooks, “The figurative elements are impersonal; reality is not in their precision, but in the evident condition of the climate in which they are immersed: anxious or happy. I was the real one, in the physical and dialectical condition in which I found myself and which I manifested. This climate does not remain closed within the painting, defined and buried. It expands to signify a broader and external condition, much more connected to the world than a veristic reference would be.”