Giacomo Manzù | Snite Museum of Art Collection

A new home for our Giacomo Manzù's Bound Christ

Very proud and thrilled to announce it!

A masterpiece of 20th-Century Italian Sculpture, Giacomo Manzù's Bound Christ, first unveiled to the public at TEFAF-Maastricht in 2019, now takes officially part of the permanent collection of the Snite Museum of Art in Notre Dame.

Realized in 1951 on request of the Onesti family for the family funerary chapel in the cemetery of Polesine Parmense, the work is the rare and unexpected apex of a path that, with contrasting results, involved the major Italian sculptors throughout the 1930s from Arturo Martini, Marino Marini to Lucio Fontana: the monumental representation of male body. Manzù's personal answer on the subject is clearly expressed in our Bound Christ, not only overturning the way to look to ancient sculpture (and the Etruscan one in particular), but also spreading the body of his young Christ with that "undeniable tendency towards concentration and tight composition" that the critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti identified in some other Manzù works of the period.

GIACOMO MANZU’

Bound Christ

1951

bronze, h. 158 cm

Provenance

Polesine Parmense (PR, Italy), funeral chapel of Onesti family (until 1961); Modena (IT), by inheritance to the descendants (until 2018).

Literature

A. Bacchi, Il Cristo legato di Giacomo Manzù, Forlì 2019 (with previous bibliography).