Sculptor E. Alfieri 1961
Carlo Valente and Livia de Luca di Pietralata, two young fiancés, were run over by a car on the 23rd of February 1959. “Hand in hand they were going towards the life, hand in hand they were caught by the Death”: here what’s written on the inscription on the sarcophagus which the sculptor Alfieri has made in relief. He has been inspired by the olive tree, which is at the same time a symbol of peace and the metaphor of the stormy path of life: beside the walls of the sarcophagus, which leans on two symbolical cut trunks, some phytomorphic patterns interlace and create a dramatic chiaroscuro in which the images of the two young, who are wrapped in a drape, blend. The phytomorphical abstraction and the reminiscences of the post-picassian period insert in the sculptor Alfieri’s reflection of those years about the figures, the structure and the tension of the volumes, with particular reference to the organicism of Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz’s volumes.
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