1972 Valeriano Trubbiani Signed Lithograph Artist Proof. Printed on thick yellow paper. Hand signed by artist and labelled P.A, meaning artist proof. Orazio referenced on the print. Orazio is the Italian form of "Horatius," tied to Roman legend (e.g., Horatius Cocles, or the Horatii). Given Trubbiani's interest in myth, symbolism, and "besieged city" themes, this is part of his body of work around this character.

Size: 19.5ʺW × 28ʺH. 

Condition: Excellent condition with some minimal light creasing from natural age.

About the Artist - Valeriano Trubbiani

Valeriano Trubbiani was an Italian sculptor, painter, and set designer, born on December 2, 1937, in Villa Potenza, near Macerata, in Italy's Marche region, and he died on August 30, 2020, in Ancona. After graduating from the Art Institute of Macerata, he attended the "school of the nude" at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, grounding his work in traditional figure study before developing his own distinctive sculptural language. He was known locally as an "art blacksmith," a craftsman with an intense, stubborn temperament rooted in the character of the Marche region, and visiting his studio was described as unsettling, filled with doll-like mobile eyes, weapons, and obsessive imagery of decaying city walls alongside the mice and bats that populated his darker menagerie.

Trubbiani's mature work developed by assembling disparate elements such s objects, machines, mechanical parts, and human or animal figures into theatrical compositions that often play on the contrast between the sublime and the horrifying. He transformed ordinary tools and agricultural machinery into sinister instruments of torture and physical constraint, and populated his sculptures with animals like mice, bats, toads, and chained cattle, sometimes fused into improbable, monstrous unions. Critics describe his style as a blend of mechanical surrealism and narrative symbolism, visionary and contemplative, presenting a dreamlike view of the human condition, violence, and power. His imagery was partly shaped by his connection to Marche's own literary tradition, particularly the poet Giacomo Leopardi, whose reputation for melancholy and rebellion against convention fascinated Trubbiani since childhood, and whose sensibility echoes through his sculptures, wood pyrographies, and drawings.