Giulio Aristide Sartorio

Biography

Sartorio was mainly a painter of landscapes and fantasy motifs, mainly based on classic poets, and legends. He was also an art teacher, an illustrator, a writer, an amateur photographer, and an independent film producer and director. Son and nephew of artists, he became interested in paintings from an early age. He studied painting at the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. As a teenager, he followed the figurative style of Mariano Fortuny. With the money he earned from his works, by his 20th anniversary he opened his own studio in Rome. In 1883, he worked in the decoration of the detached house of the count Gamberini, and presents in public his major work, "Malaria (Dum Romae consulitur morbus imperat)". The subtitle of the painting, in Latin, has a political message: while Rome has debates, the disease spreads. Co-financed by Pietro Giorgi, Sartorio opens a new studio in in via Margutta. In 1884, Sartorio visits Paris, and contacts Gabriele D'Annunzio. In 1886 befriends artists like Edoardo Scarfoglio and Francesco Paolo Michetti. At the Caffè Greco, in Roma, there was a gathering of artists animated by Angelo Conti, that were creating a new style, the Italian symbolism. Sartorio becomes a member of "In Arte Libertas" [Latin: Freedom through Art], fan association started by Nino Costa, and he will joint exhibits with him often. Still in 1886, he is one of the artists contributing to the "painted edition" of D'Annunzio's poems, published by Isaotta Guttadauro, in which one recognizes the pre-Raphaellite style that dominated the end of the 19th Century in Italian art. His painting "I figli di Caino" won him the gold medal of the World Expo (Paris 1889). In 1893, Sartorio travels to England, where he has direct access of artists such as Burne-Jones, Rossetti and William Morris. Karl Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1818 - 1901) invited Sartorio to teach painting at the Weimar Academy, which he accepted from 1896 to 1900. In 1901, Sartorio married Julie Bonn, daughter of Wilhelm Bonn (1843 - 1910) in Villa Bonn (Kronberg in the Taunus, Hochtaunuskreis district, Hesse, Germany), where the Frankfurt based, Hebrew bankers' lineage had a summer residence since 1864. Shortly after, the couple moved to Sartorio's home, a rich mansion in a park, the Orti di Galatea, where they lived a few years until their marriage was annulled (1905). Sartorio re-designed the house entirely, both the interiors and the outdoor elements. Julie Bonn would die in 1944. Sartorio accepted to participate in the Biennale di Venezia 1907; for it he worked very fast, and employing a technique of painting he devised himself, finishing a set of 11 large oil paintings (240 square meters in all) that were exhibited in the main hall of Venezia's Esposizione Internazionale, and remained there until the next Salon, in 1909. He will be present practically in all the Venezian events, from the 1st to the 17th Biennale, as well as in the Montecitorio (1908-1912). During World War I, Sartorio manages to paint several works featuring episodes of war, but he was a volunteer in the Army, was wounded, and arrested by the enemy. In 1918, free again, he marries his second wife, Marga Sevilla a younger woman who appeared in some of the earlier photographic and film experiments, Sartorio was an amateur photograph also, and eventually produced a film in which she stars as the mythic Galatea, but also alternating as the fairy Egeria, who appeared and disappeared from the sight of men travelling through the woods. Some say that Il mistero di Galatea (1918) is the best of Sartorio's few cinematic works. (Thanks to various on line sources, mainly the museum catalog of MUVE - Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia)