"The people are the ones who have endured and paid the most and they are here immortalized by six figures that unravel from an imaginary center, like an explosion on a wedge-shaped base": this is how Ercole Priori, in 1970, explained to the client the sense of his Monument to Liberation for the Middle School of Via Trebbia in Cremona.
Of that work we preserve this singular model made of raw earth, covered by a plaster priming and by a color that wants to imitate the effect of the bronze that would have been then used for the sculpture in monumental scale.
Death and life blend perfectly here: the deflagration expresses both the dramatic destruction of the war, but also the release of the vital forces of freedom and justice that led to the Liberation.
The theme of war is one of the most recurrent in the production of the sculptor from Cremona, who had a dramatic direct experience of it having participated in the Russian Campaign from 1941 to 1943. It is mainly expressed - in sculpture as in drawings and paintings - through the marked physicality of bodies that crowd together.
Donated by Tiziana Priori, 2011
