About the artist:

Renzo Vespignani (1924 - 26 April 2001) was an Italian painter, printmaker and illustrator. Vespignani illustrated the works of Boccaccio, Kafka and T. S. Eliot, among others. In 1956, he co-founded the magazine Citta Aperta ("City Opened") and in 1963, co-founded the group II Pro e II Contro (Pro and Con) for neorealism in figure art. When Renzo Vespignani began to paint, he dedicated himself to the recording of the difficult years of the German occupation of Rome. Other "masters" of the period are Alberto Ziveri and Luigi Bartolini. Vespignani began to get exposure in 1945, when he collaborates like a designer to numerous political-literary reviews ("Sunday", "Crowd", "Mercury", "The Literary Fair") with the poetic documentary style aesthetic popular in the cinema of Rossellini and De Sica. In 1956 he found, with other intellectuals, the review "City Opened", centralized on the problems of the city culture. He carried out an intense activity of illustration in which he displayed inexhaustible inventiveness in his references to the literary spirit. With Vespignani’s work generating in great cycles, he dedicated his attentions to the crisis of the affluent society beginning in the late 1960s: The Boarding for Citera (1969), the Album of Family (1971), Between Two Wars (1973-75). But no matter where his muse took him, his closest artistic relationship remained with literature. Vespignani illustrated works of Alleg, Kafka, Boccacccio, Majakowsky, the Eliots, Beautiful, Villon, Leopardi, Door. In 1985, he exhibited at the Academy of France with a show that drew comparisons in its dialectic themes to another great observer of Rome, Pier Paul Pasolini. Renzo Vespignani died on April 26, 2001, while undergoing surgery.