Mario Donizetti

Art Brokerage: Mario Donizetti Italian Artist: b. 1932. Mario Donizetti is one of the leading figures in contemporary art, he is considered the greatest exponent of realist figurative painting. In a documentary dedicated to him by CNN–International of New York, Elsa Klensch described the “timeless quality” of his art, which has made him famous all over the world. The scientific precision of his technical approach has led to his resurrection of varnished and glazed egg yolk tempera (the ancient secrets of which had been completely forgotten), his invention of a method for encaustic painting with an easel and his invention of the “encausticised pastel” (a radical transformation of the pastel with structural modifications to the method and materials). Despite these being absolutely personal and completely innovative techniques, they represent continuity with the great past of western art. This consideration is also remarked upon by Phyllis A. Tickle, who writes in her essay “Greed” (Oxford University Press, New York 2003) that “Mario Donizetti…more than any other contemporary artist has understood that new imagination must always go back to ask from its ancients the footings for its own work.…Saying that the destruction of the past leads to nothing but silence, he teaches that what must come next is a reverence for whatever is left standing out of what has been”. Several of his celebrated portraits – including the one of Pope John Paul II, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington – have been published on the cover of “Time” magazine. In 1983, he had the honour of staging an anthological exhibition of paintings and drawings in the halls of the Ambrosiana Picture Gallery in Milan. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.