Artworks
from lot n. 83 to lot n. 130

« The illustrated edition of Collodi's classic book was born not for an “external” request, but from a personal initiative. The artist, as Golpe, wanted to celebrate the eightieth anniversary since the first publication of the book. To illustrate the fairy tale of the famous puppet, Poggi did more than 100 drawings visualizing the complexity of the fantastic universe of Collodi.
When the work was almost finished, Golpe offered the whole series to Fratelli Fabbri Editori but they refused. For them, it was not suitable for an audience of kids: the graphic opus of Poggi is, in fact, an adult, sophisticated work of art, completely different from the classic style of the fairy tales published by Fratelli Fabbri, whose target readers were the average families with limited cultural expectations. The illustration of Golpe were realized using different graphic techniques, from the charcoal used for the initial letters to full-page figures placed at the beginning of every chapter, to the temperas (most of the time used in the double-pages), to ink drawings, traits and colors used in the drawings depicting costumes and settings of the past. (...)
It was Studio D’Ami, whom I was working with back then, to see the great value of this editorial project. Now the public taste was mature for this kind of work. (...)
The reader is charmed by the variety of the style of the images – some cruel, some fantastic, some poetic, some realistic – that features in the volume with dazzling effects, creating an involving sensation of full immersion into a unseen universe of forms and colors, lights and shadows resulting in a general praise to the talent of the author by the readers and graphic arts aficionados. With a superior skill, Golpe knew how to bend the bi-dimensional matter to a new three-dimensionality: he was able to give make us feel the uneasiness and the apprehension, the tension and the drama of the Collodi Bildungsroman: but also the joyfulness and the airiness of the kid-puppet. »
(from "Golpe, Lupambolo, Vulpes e molti altri" by Gianni Milone)

Artworks
from lot n. 369 to lot n. 388

I draw to tell with signs, symbols and metaphors, and use them as if they were words.
(Serena Riglietti)

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the first Italian publication of Harry Potter, Urania Casa d'Aste is proud to present, for the first time on the market, the seven covers and different illustrations of the most striking editorial phenomenon of the XXI Century, the magician's cult saga by JK Rowling who made entire generations dream.

« Enough, really, even just a cover to define the meaning of a work, that of Serena Riglietti, which is isolated and peremptory in the field, now vast, of Italian illustration. If you look at the table with which the book was presented to the public: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, from Rowling, you immediately notice how an evident statement of poetics underlies it. Serena, in fact, does not really intend to illustrate, but wants, instead, to always create an icon. In this sense, it does not seek its legitimate ancestors in the history of illustration, but in that of cartellonism.
So it is good to remember the names of Gino Boccasile, of Leonetto Cappiello, of Armando Testa, or three very large and very strongly differentiated presences.
Serena's icons are summarized and programmatic, but also hermeneutical. In fact they interpret the characters and the events, they must be sure to gather in themselves, very ambitiously, both the meaning and the meaning of the work to which they refer. (...)
Everything has value, in its icons-tables, only if it is truly memorable, only if it takes on a challenge, only if it asks to be unequivocally remembered. (...) Serena has a calculatedly thin, deliberately minute, deliberately whispered sign. Its delicate contours seem to want to create an oxymoron and determine a paradox: the icon is very intense, caressing the sign that makes it truly visible in the last dimension.
To the pure lightness of the sign, never casual, Serena entrusts her viaticum to access the fantastic, but also to recognize the bizarre. (...)
With his unmistakable sign, but as thin as the silver key of Lovercraft, Serena enters the eternal dawn, where there are no cries, but only whispers, because the whisper is the expressive module that allows you to provoke the rice of the fairies. »

(“Una Nursery luminosa” by Antonio Faeti, introdution to the catalogue of exibition held in Galleria d'Arte Stefano Forni of Bologna in 2003)

"La rosa di Bagdad"
by A. G. Domenighini, 1949 (italian version)

"Una rosa di guerra"
by Massimo Becattini, 2009 (complete documentary)