by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur
Alberto Martini was an Italian artist with many talents who strongly influenced the imagination of his own and the following era. Today his fame is almost exclusively relegated to the lovers of fantastic art, but actually Martini was also a symbolist painter, a precursor of Surrealism, as well as an illustrator of literary texts with a precise and refined line. It is no coincidence that in London, on the occasion of his exhibition in 1914, he was nicknamed “Italian pen-and-ink genius”. As an illustrator, he created images combined with texts by Dante Alighieri and Luigi Pulci, but also by Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare, the poems of Paul Verlaine and the work “Poemetti in prosa” by Mallarmé. Read more