GIULIO ARISTIDE SARTORIO (Italian, 1860-1932). Ruins, Tiahuanaco, 1924. Oil on canvas board. 16 x 18 inches (40.6 x 45.7...

Description

GIULIO ARISTIDE SARTORIO (Italian, 1860-1932)
Ruins, Tiahuanaco, 1924
Oil on canvas board
16 x 18 inches (40.6 x 45.7 cm)
Signed, dated, and inscribed by artist upper right: Bolivia, Tiahuanaco Lerovine, G.A. Sartorio MCM XXIV

THE JEAN AND GRAHAM DEVOE WILLIFORD CHARITABLE TRUST

Despite his passion for American painting, Graham Williford had catholic tastes in art which occasionally resulted in rather remarkable acquisitions outside the usual scope of his collection. This painting of the pre-Columbian ruins of Tiahuanaco in the Bolivian Andes by the Roman painter and film director Giulio Sartorio is one such acquisition. In the later phase of a celebrated artistic career as a Symbolist painter and friend of the English PreRaphaelites, as one of the finest late 19th-century painters of the Roman Campagna with its ancient ruins and friend of poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, and a prize-winning decorative painter, Sartorio explored the Middle East, Japan and Latin America during the 1920s. In Bolivia he was profoundly inspired by the Tiahuanaco ruins, the oldest sacred center of Andean region (an earlier name of the site was taypicala, meaning the 'rock in the center'). Traditionally it is thought to have been built by the predecessors of the Inca Civilization. Some of the massive structures at this site, like the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx in Egypt and Baalbek in Lebanon, date from pre-flood times, as long ago as 10,500 BC. Originally a coastal empire and now twelve miles from the coast of the sacred Lake of Titicaca, Tiahuanaco was the source of the creation myths, the social order, and the extraordinary preoccupation with astronomy that underwrote thousands of years of Andean culture. In the present work, Sartorio places in foreground of his composition the mysterious figurative Stela 8, and shows the ruins of the Kalasasaya temple off to the right.


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