«L’Eroico» Lorenzo Viani

Abstract

The development of the expressionistic language adopted by Lorenzo Viani expressed itself equally in both artistic fields of this artist from Viareggio: painting and xylography. For Viani xylography represented the privileged testing ground for his poetics, especially thanks to its innate roughness that managed to perfectly satisfy the rigidity and ‘irregularity’ peculiar to the fauve-expressionism of the artist in the first decades of XIX century.

Important examples of this creative process can be found in his artworks realized between 1914-1916 for «L’Eroica», the art and literature journal founded by Ettore Cozzani (1884 1971) in La Spezia in 1911 that soon became the meeting and promotion point of the main Italian contemporary xylography.

With his wood engravings published by L’Eroica, Viani contributed to the so-called ‘Xylography Secession’, that is the migration of a fierce group of young artists from the ‘worn out’ and trite Art Nouveau style towards a more modern language enriched by neo-primitivism trends in line with the newborn movement that was gaining ground in the rest of Europe in particular in France and Germany.