In the history of the Italian Novecento it is sculpture which 'flies the flag' and which has a hegemonic role. Confirmation of this comes to us from the international market which is always an infallible judge, and it comes from literature. It was Maurizio Calvesi who a few years ago invented the apt epigraph Italian line' in plastic arts. I realise that this definition works and is often used to define a phenomenon which has imposed itself authoritatively on the world. The 'Italian line' has its historical roots in Donatello with his destructured realism, in Agostino di Duccio with his infinitely undulated circular vision of forms that can be rendered figuratively. It ends up in Modernity with Wildt, Arturo Martini, with Marino Marini, Manzu, Minguzzi, Greco and with Francesca Messina. It touches upon our day with Giuliano Vangi. The latter's recent success in Japan - a success sanctioned with the award of the 'Imperial' prize and the inauguration of a large monographic museum bearing his name - is the most effective demonstration in terms of the media of the international fortune encountered by our sculpture in the century that has just ended.
This historical premise is necessary if we want to give Luigi Galligani a correct critical collocation. He belongs to that school of Italian sculptors who have chosen the figurative sculpture of their forebears (the Etruscans and Anterlami, Niccolò del-1'Arca and Desiderio da Settignano, Agostino di Duccio and Luca della Robbia, Donatello and Canova) assimilating that tradition first and then using it (each in his own way, each in accordance with various inclinations and aims, with the naturalness and the freedom with which we use our native language. This attitude towards tradition (total expressive freedom and at the same time identification of a type that I would like to call 'generic') allows Galligani to deal with Modernity without embarrassment, without lead in his wings. Just as I who write use the language of Leopardi and Manzoni and would not know how to, nor would want to, use others, so do Galligani and his teachers and companions along the way, protagonists of the 'Italian line' use the language of Donatello and Agostino di Succio, Laurana and Desiderio, aware at the same time however that, with the use of that language, they are called upon to recount their time and provide meaning to the arguments and myths of the time we live in. Not just to recall the past. For example, Luigi Galligani, in this phase of his life, at the peak of his 40 years, has chosen to deal with ambiguity and ubiquity, existential categories typical of our culture and incumbent upon our time. It is just that, with singular poetic astuteness, he has wanted to lend meaning to these concepts with the figures of myth marked by the female image.
Here then are his Sirens, his Sibyls, his Europas and his goddesses descended from Olympia, his female personifications of the Seasons, but also his bathers and their 'full moons'. They are 'ubiquitous' creatures because they are found in reality and in our dreams, in water and on the earth, they inhabit frontier places suspended between the present and the future. They are 'ambiguous' creatures because you would not know how to define them; they bear with them an amiable enigma. They are in us and beyond us, very antique and at the same time very modern.
Luigi Galligani knows how to move with a light touch, with the virtuosity of a conjuror. He knows the hidden dangers of the Academy, he knows how to avoid the dry ground of Quotation. He is cultivated but realises that culture, if badly used, may veil the freshness of poetic invention. He is master of all techniques (marble and bronze, terracotta and ceramics) but has understood in time - fortunately for him and for us -that technique is the handmaiden of art, but is not yet art.
The charm of Luigi Galligani, the meeting point which allows thoughts, culture and technique to become style and melt into the melodious quiet of art, is for me to be sought in a sort of lightness'. An underlying 'Levitas' guided by a warm heart and a serene mind, which moves the hands of the sculptor when he creates his tender and sumptuous female forms. The result for us is the pleasure of looking and caressing. Which is then everything we can and must ask for from a sculptor.