FRANCO BARGIGGIA (attributed)
(Milan 1880 - 1966)

Franco Bargiggia was born in Milan on 10 October 1888 to Giovanni Battista, a professional tailor, and Carolina Stefanini. The parents, having understood his natural propensity for art, enroll the boy at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where the famous teachers Giuseppe Mentessi (1857-1931), Cesare Tallone (1853-1919) and Enrico Butti (1847-1932). Franco Bargiggia graduated with flying colors in 1912 and exhibited, in the same year, at the National Sculpture Exhibition in Milan, obtaining the Tantardini Prize with the work The Pain. In the immediate post-war period he devoted himself mainly to social works (Sons of the Road, Refugees, Worker Mother, Widow), works that he would conceive during the short truces of a serious form of progressive deforming arthritis that affects his hands, the his main work tool. In 1930, in the hope of overcoming health problems aggravated by the aftermath of a lung disease, Bargiggia moved to Bussana di Sanremo together with his wife Elda, married in Milan in 1928. In 1931, after the birth of his daughter Silvia, he took part in the 1st Art Exhibition of the Sanremesi Artists, set up by the Municipality of Sanremo in Villa Ormond. The 1931 exhibition marks the beginning of a long series of competitions and exhibitions in which Franco Bargiggia obtains important prizes and awards: in 1933 he participates in the 4th Art Exhibition and 1st Provincial of Villa Ormond with bronze works First child, Youth , Torso, Gioie materne, Mamma, Waiting and the important group Bimbo con tartaruga, purchased in 1988 by the Municipality of Sanremo and currently exhibited in the halls of the Civic Museum; in 1934 he won the national sculpture competition Sogni di madre in Genoa; in 1935 he participated in the Exhibition of the Interprovincial Union of Fine Arts of Liguria in Sanremo with the two bronze works Poppante and Christmas Day; in 1936 he ranks second at the Sanremo Sculpture Prize with the sketch for the Monument to Queen Margherita and wins the following year with the work Il legionario. If the works of the XNUMXs are combined with the late Liberty style, in the XNUMXs Bargiggia arrives at an intense verism and the intimate themes linked to the family world become the fulcrum of his expressive research. His wife and daughter still at an early age inspire a series of subjects related to motherhood and childhood: Giocondità (1932), Primo bimbo (1933), Maternità (1936), Maternity Tenderness (1938), preserved in the Museo Civico di Sanremo , and the famous Prayer in vespers (1936), exhibited in the atrium of the Palazzo Comunale di Sanremo. In 1941 his wife and daughter moved to Milan: Bargiggia remained alone in his home in Via Rivolte San Sebastiano, in the Pigna di Sanremo. Although he is highly esteemed in the artistic circles of the Riviera, large commissions are lacking and in the meantime his painful illness is accentuated. Franco Bargiggia spends the last years of his life alone and ill. It is supported economically by a few friends, among them the painter Alberto Beltrame. He died at the Sanremo hospital on March 18, 1966.