Ubaldo Cosimo VENEZIANI

(Bologna 1894 - Milan 1958)

La Morsa

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Pen and black ink. Signed VENE / ZIANI at the lower right.
Faintly inscribed LA MORSA at the upper right.
Further inscribed base cm 17 / scontornato at the upper right. Numbered 1695 in blue chalk on the verso.
246 x 334 mm. (9 3/4 x 13 1/8 in.)




After completing his studies at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, Ubaldo Veneziani became known as a fashion illustrator, and his drawings appeared in several women’s fashion magazines. Active as a gifted painter, book illustrator and poster designer in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Veneziani eventually gave up a career in the advertising business to devote himself solely to art and design. Among his designs for book covers are several for the publishing house Edizioni Alpes in the 1920’s, such as Alberto Moravia’s Gli Indiffirenti, published in 1929. Veneziani also designed the covers for the first Italian editions of Théophile Gautier’s Ménagerie intime, published in Rome in 1928, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which appeared in Milan a year later.

Literature

The present sheet is a drawing for the title page or frontispiece of a printing of the play La Morsa (The Vise) by Luigi Pirandello. Written in 1892 and first published in 1898 under the title L’epilogo in the cultural journal Ariel, which had been founded by Pirandello. La Morsa was not performed on stage until December 1910, at the Teatro Metastasio in Rome.



Ubaldo Cosimo VENEZIANI

La Morsa