Ennio Cocchi Landscape And Still Life Painted On Two Sides Of A Panel

ENNIO COCCHI, PAINTED ON BOTH SIDES IN OIL ON WOOD; ONE SIDE FEATURES A TUSCAN LANDSCAPE AND THE OTHER A STILL LIFE. MEASURES 38x28 cm / 50x40 cm. ENNIO COCCHI While still very young, he attended the studio of the engraver Emilio Mazzoni Zarini, and in 1929 he enrolled at the State Art Institute of Porta Romana, where he was a student of the painter Gianni Vagnetti, then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1937. In 1940, the Gallery of Modern Art in Florence acquired two of his works, and in 1951, one of his paintings was sent to New York for the school at the Church of Our Lady of Carmel. In 1955, he painted a fresco of the Madonna and Child for the City of Florence in the tabernacle on Via del Campuccio. In 1960, after his marriage, he settled in Antella, a hamlet of Bagno a Ripoli (Florence), where he moved his studio, retaining his reserved nature and his determination to stay away from the temptations of the art market while continuing to exhibit his work. In 1962, he held a retrospective exhibition at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (featuring forty-eight works), which received favorable reviews; in 1963, that same Academy offered him a teaching position, but Cocchi chose to decline in order to devote himself entirely to painting; in 1965, he participated in various solo exhibitions, and one of his works, titled *Feeding the Hungry*, exhibited in Viareggio, earned him the gold medal from Pope Paul VI. Although he is best known for his oil paintings of still lifes and landscapes, it should be noted that he devoted considerable time to portraiture and also employed other techniques throughout his artistic career: from etching to drypoint, from lithography to pencil and ink drawing. His works can be found in many private collections not only in Italy but also in France and Germany, as well as in two national museums in Poland (a self-portrait in Warsaw and a still life in Kraków). He is buried in the Monumental Cemetery of the Misericordia in Antella, for which he worked on the decorations during the last eight years of his life (1980–1987), during which he painted sketches and preparatory cartoons for as many as thirty-five mosaics (thirty-four of which are visible, as one was later covered by burial niches) created and installed by the Mario Viacava firm of Pietrasanta, which, during the same period, for the same cemetery, worked on many other mosaics based on cartoons by Giuseppe Piombanti Ammannati, Gino Terreni, and Arcangelo Zanoner. Of these thirty-five mosaics, eighteen were created in communal chapels, seven in private chapels, and ten as decorative panels for elevators. All feature religious symbols or scenes—whether figurative or not—related to episodes from the Old and New Testaments. Two of the preparatory sketches for the mosaics (“The Baptism of Jesus” and “Saint Francis”) are on display at the headquarters of the Misericordia. A self-portrait of his has been part of the Uffizi collection since 1984.