Renaissance Modernist
Fig. 1. Village of Stowe, Vermont by Luigi Lucioni (1900– 1988), 1931. Signed and dated “Luigi Lucioni 1931” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 by 33 1/2 inches. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota, gift of the Estate of Mrs. George P. Douglas; photograph © Bridgeman Images. All photographs courtesy of the Shelburne Museum, Vermont. PLEASE NOTE: This image is protected by the artist’s copyright which needs to be cleared by you. If you require assistance in clearing permission we will be pleased to help you. Although not invariably, the course of an artist’s career often takes the form of a parabolic arc. Tastes change, one art-world “ism” replaces another, and work that was once embraced— conventional or otherwise—loses currency. Some painters, whether responding to the marketplace or their own creative impulses, pivot to a new style, and find themselves in the swim again. Committed to realism all his life, Luigi Lucioni was content to stand on shore. Although he appreciated Cézanne and Matisse in his formative years, he was never swayed by them and the later permutations of abstraction. Thoroughly influenced by his visits in the 1920s from his adopted home in America to his native Italy, he took the masters of the Renaissance as his model. As he told an interviewer in 1971: “I never worried about whether I was stylish or not stylish.”1 Fig. 2. Self-Portrait, 1949. Signed and dated “Luigi Lucioni 1949” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 32 by 26 inches. Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, gift of Douglas Mariboe.Fig. 3. My Father, 1941. Oil on canvas, 34 1/4 by 28 1/4 inches. Shelburne Museum, bequest of Luigi Lucioni; photograph by Andy Duback. Born in Lombardy in 1900 and raised in New York, Lucioni was a longtime resident of Vermont, where the