The Nuptial Frieze

This is a bas-relief composed of three panels to be connected as a frieze, forming a type of pointed dorsal where the allegory of life is represented with the first parents and their first-born child. At the center, representing life, there is the Adam figure, who emerges from the fronds of a tree from which he breaks free; in the right panel Adam and Eve tie themselves in a loving embrace; in the left panel the newborn son is added to Adam and Eve, where she hands him to his father for the embrace that gives life to the first, trinity-like, familiar nucleus. A classic monumentalism of metopic taste is present in this artwork which is yet renewed with a plastic flexibility that still recalls the five nude bas-reliefs in pink marble of this same period. “The thematic, not attempting the heroic key, keeps to a somehow nearly intimist symbolism; nearly every detail seems to recover more wide-ranging dimensions closing itself in a reductive geometrism, tinged with ‘archaic’ solutions even if still very far from the stylism just exhibited by Bourdelle’s frieze for the Champs Elisée Theater” Raffaele Monti (1976).

Floor:
Room: Early Works
Year: 1910 ca.
Author: Libero Andreotti