Aldo Bartelletti 1898-1976
“A master he already certainly is, and his career bears witness to it. The son of a sculptor, he could hardly have escaped an early attraction to the plastic arts. He had no formally appointed master, and his personality was shaped almost freely through contact with the masterpieces of museums[1].”
It was in these laudatory terms that the critic Charles-Emmanuel Curinier described, in 1922, the singular career of Aldo Bartelletti, a young sculptor exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français. An Italian who had only recently settled in Paris, Bartelletti was born into a family of artists from Serravezza in Tuscany. He refined his training in the studio of Horace Daillon, an academic sculptor awarded medals at the Universal Expositions of 1889 and 1900, before studying under Maurice Roger-Marx, a specialist in animal sculpture.
His earliest works were clearly influenced by the latter: Bartelletti initially exhibited small marble display sculptures, most often depicting domestic animals (dogs and cats) which critics compared to the work of Antoine-Louis Barye and Emmanuel Frémiet. Appointed an honorary member of the Salon des Artistes Français in 1924, he was awarded a bronze medal in 1927. Building on this success, Bartelletti established his studio in Malakoff in 1928, before relocating in 1939 to Bourg-la-Reine, where he taught direct carving, a technique in which he had become a specialist.
[1] Morro, Clément [Curinier, Charles-Emmanuel], « Les sculpteurs - Aldo Bartelletti », Revue moderne des arts et de la vie, 30 July 1922, p. 17.
