Artist Bart Sanciolo painted his first canvas at the age of 10, under the close watch of his father Nino, who was a journalist for Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera by profession and a painter, poet, writer and “Renaissance man” the rest of the time.
Then came the protests of 1968, during which the Sicilians attempted to destabilise archaic power structures.
Halfway around the world, far from the political unrest, was Australia.
One evening, over dinner, a family friend who ran a travel agency in Melbourne told the Sanciolos about the haven that was Australia.
The next day, the family began the immigration process.
Even Bart’s mother, an “adventuress”, was excited at the prospect of moving to a new country.
The Sanciolos – mother, father and four children – arrived in Melbourne in 1969.
Botticelli? I beg your pardon?
“In those days, the average [Australian] man was interested in sport, not art,” Sanciolo says.
“For the first four years, I wanted to return to Italy to live with my aunt.”
When the artist’s father went to enrol one of his children at Moreland State School, the school called on an Italo-Australian boy to act as an interpreter.
Nino Sanciolo felt belittled, but not once did he consider moving back to Sicily.
He loved Australia precisely because of what the average man was, and for the fact he didn’t have to bow down for anyone.
Nino never had to learn to speak English well and he was able to continue his career as a journalist Down Under, working first at Il Globo, then as editor of La Fiamma in Melbourne.
In his high school days, Bart often snuck into the classrooms where art was being taught, and the lesson coordinator would immediately drag him back to class.
Sanciolo dreamt of studying fine arts at university, but in an unfortunate twist of fate, the external commission which assessed his work for university admission purposes never contacted him.
The aspiring artist personally delivered his portfolio to RMIT, only to be told that the fine arts course was already full.
He was told he could study sculpture in his first year then request a transfer in the second.
But when the opportunity to transfer arose, it was already too late as Sanciolo had discovered a new passion: sculpting.
Having experimented with different materials, the young artist decided he preferred metal.
“Metal is very similar to drawing,” he explains.
“Italian art has always focused more on drawing, especially ‘line’, while ‘colour’ belongs more to northern Europe.
“For me, metal represents ‘line’ in three dimensions.
“It satisfies and surprises me.
“It starts as a mental aesthetic principle which is then transformed into a tangible form.”
Sheets, pipes and pieces of metal are shaped, stretched and welded.
“It’s not done using heat,” Sanciolo explains.
“Heat destroys more than it creates.
“I like that if I want to create a curve, I have to bend it with my hands... it’s like drawing.”
This principle is the opposite of Lucio Fontana’s so-called “spatial concept”, where the cuts and punctures made on the canvas are voids that create space.
Sanciolo uses lines to separate space, and he doesn’t call his creations sculptures, but rather three-dimensional drawings and “linear concepts”.
His creative process stems from a strong belief in his intuition.
“Intuition is the key to everything,” he says.
“To every artwork and every person.”
Scrolling through the list of Sanciolo’s main works, his first commissioned piece stands out: an important monument dedicated to Dante Alighieri.
The three sides of the 94-square-metre bronze pyramidal sculpture represent Hell, Purgatory and Paradise from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“It’s five tonnes of bronze and two tonnes of iron on a base made of almost 60 cubic metres of cement,” Sanciolo says of his masterpiece.
The artist is eager to outline the technical specifications of the artwork, perhaps because the influence it’s had on his artistic career and personal life is a little harder to describe.
The monument was commissioned in 1977, as a gift to Australian society from the Italian community in Melbourne.
It was created with funds raised by 52 Italian social clubs.
At the time, a young Sanciolo was working full-time as a teacher and was starting his own family.
He spent seven years on the project, working on it at night without being paid a cent.
When the sculpture was finished, the Melbourne City Council suffered an identity crisis.
Council members were no longer sure they wanted to erect a monument so foreign to the founding myths of Anglo-Saxon culture in the heart of the city.
Furthermore, erecting the sculpture could have set a precedent and made other ethnic communities feel as though they too should donate monuments in honour of their heritage.
It was a big dilemma for a society that didn’t yet wave the multicultural flag with conviction.
Not to mention that in the early 1980s, Melbourne’s media and the general public reacted rather angrily to the installation of a sculpture by Ron Roberston-Swann in the Melbourne City Square.
The enormous sculpture was an abstract work made from sheets of yellow prefabricated metal, and was unanimously rebaptised the “Yellow Peril”.
After six months, the sculpture was “swept under the rug” and moved to Southbank.
The Dante monument was “not going to happen”.
The Melbourne City Council stalled for two and a half years, giving the monument one potential location after another, from Domain Road to University Square in Carlton, without ever coming to a final decision.
An article published in Il Globo in March 1985 documents an official ceremony attended by the then Italian Ambassador in Australia to celebrate the permits granted to instal the sculpture in Lincoln Square, on Swanston Street.
But even then, bureaucracy got in the way.
Once the welding was completed in Moorabbin, the sculpture was stationed in a parking lot rented by the “pro-Dante monument” committee, led by Nino Sanciolo.
It stayed there until, in a meeting with Council, the committee members themselves “reneged on their commitment”.
Then the chancellor of La Trobe University stood up and proposed that the structure be installed on the university’s campus.
On March 29, 1987, the monument finally found its home.
Despite the bitterness with which he recounts the story of his first important work, Sanciolo highlights that those nights spent shaping the bronze structure represent an important chapter of his artistic career.
Today, some of Sanciolo’s work can be found at 101 Collins Street in the CBD, two churches in Chelsea and Mentone, St Peter’s College in Cranbourne and the Westin Hotel in Sydney.
Many of his masterpieces have also been purchased by art collectors from all over the world.
Around 20 of his creations were showcased in the exhibition ‘The Seeker’, which ran from April to May this year at Fox Galleries in Collingwood, from sculptures to oil paintings and linear concepts.
Since 2006, Sanciolo regularly visits an artists’ community in Italy – not in his birthplace of Sicily, but in the Umbrian town of Pietrafitta.
This is where his love of cypresses was born: alongside the female figure, they are a recurring them in his work.
Perhaps it’s because the long pyramid shape of the evergreen tree is similar to the slender female figures often depicted in his creations.
“With its tip pointed towards the sky and eternal space, the cypress is an almost divine element to me,” Sanciolo says.
What about Australian nature? Does it inspire his work?
“Yes... but I don’t see any cypresses!”
