Fausto Vagnetti is a representative of Italian painting from the era of transition from the 19th to the 20th century. He emigrated from Tuscany to Rome and started infusing Tuscan brilliance and chromatism into the warm Roman style of painting.
Paintings
An erudite researcher of the laws of sight and a master of drawing, F. Vagnetti painted principally oil and pastel pictures. After an early period when he flanked the chromatic researches of Emile Claus and Georges Seurat, he experienced a personalpointillism in which the stroke's refinement and chromatic science join to an astonishing depictive capability. Some of his principal works are monumental landscapes, portraits of a deep psychological sharpness, large compositions of familiar or social characters. In 1922 he painted three monumental portraits of the Italian Sovereigns for the Governmental Palace of Zara; in 1923 he carried out a "Trittico francescano" in the Church of S. Polo near La Verna. In 1943, on Vatican commission, he painted a portrait of Pope Pius XII in the Church of SS. Pietro e Paolo in EUR at Rome and, in 1944, for the Board Office of the Italian Socialist Party, he painted the portraits of Bruno Buozzi, Giacomo Matteotti and Filippo Turati.
Exhibitions
From 1907 to 1930 Fausto Vagnetti was present in Italian artisticlife taking part in twenty collective exhibitions. In the following fifteen years, because of his manifest aversion to Fascism, he was kept off the stage of pictorial art only to reappear in the Rome "Quadriennali" of 1945 and 1948. In 2004 two anthological exhibitions were opened in Anghiari, his native town, and in Rome, accommodated by the Ministero dei Beni ambientali e culturali in the San Michele a Ripa's Institute.
Writings
In 1928 he won the "Concorso Nazionale Poletti" publicized by San Luca Academy for an essay about the causes of the decline of the art of painting. On commission for the Ministry of Education in 1943 he wrote "La regia Accademia di Belle Artidi Roma" edited by Le Monnier, Florence. In the same year he published "Il disegno nelle scuole d’Italia" Metodo per gli Istituti magistrali". Main following works are the "Trattato di Prospettiva lineare e Teoria delle ombre" and, in 1950 the "Trattato di Proiezioni ortogonali". He left a diary made by several notebooks about painting and autobiographical events, which is stored and accessible at the :it:Archivio diaristico nazionale|Archivio diaristico nazionale in Pieve Santo Stefano, where it has been finalist in the competition 2016 of the Premio Pieve Saverio Tutino.
