Alfredo Melani - L'arte nell'industria - 1909

Alfredo Melani, Art in Industry. Milan, Vallardi, 1909. 4 volumes, publisher’s cloth, dust jackets. Wood and plaster works. Metal works. Stone, marble, alabaster, ceramics, mosaics, glass works. Bone and ivory works. Textile works, wallpapers and decorated leathers. Embroidery, lace, placards, prints, etc. IV volumes. Volume I Text. With 405 figures in the text. Pages XIV, 509, 2. Volume I Atlas. Editorial folder containing 73 color and black-and-white plates and 13 large folded detailed plates. Volume II Text. With 410 figures in the text. Pages 675. Volume II Atlas. Editorial folder containing 160 color and black-and-white plates and 7 large folded detailed plates. In excellent condition with normal signs of time - marginal defects to the protective dust jackets.


Alfredo Melani (Pistoia, January 23, 1859 – Milan, December 29, 1928) was an Italian architect and art critic.

Biography
Alfredo Melani was born on January 23, 1859 in Pistoia, where he began classical studies at the episcopal seminary and at the Forteguerri high school, later moving to technical schools. Among his teachers were Francesco Bartolini, responsible for ornamental and geometric drawing, and the aesthetics professor Aleardo Aleardi.

In 1874 he continued his studies in Florence at the Regio Istituto di belle arti, i.e., the academy which had just been reformed a year earlier: here he was admitted directly to the two-year program of common instruction and in the academic year 1875-1876 moved to the three-year program of the so-called special teaching of architecture. Here he met, as lecturer in geometry, perspective and architecture, Professor Giuseppe Castellazzi, a student of Pietro Selvatico and bearer of new interests, not least openness toward Oriental architecture, which would radically alter his relationship with study. At the end of each of the three school years, Melani earned the academy prizes and the corresponding silver medal, distinguishing himself respectively in the drafting of collective essays, in the project of a Florentine-style 14th-century baptistery, and in the project of a Catholic-Evangelical cemetery for a capital city, and in the last year (1877-1978) also receiving an honorable mention for molded ornament. In the following period 1878-1879, in which he was the only student enrolled in the optional year, he completed official studies by obtaining the license to teach architectural drawing, with a challenging test concerning the design of a penitentiary for 400 convicts.

Within the framework of cultural exchanges developed during the academical period, the knowledge of Camillo Boito is to be noted, on the occasion of Boito’s stay in Florence with his Brera students on a study trip, and, through Castellazzi, the epistolary contact with the French architect and archaeologist Jules Gailhabaud regarding studies on the Pistoia Town Hall.

In 1877, still in parallel with the Florentine period, Melani won the Dal Gallo scholarship, a nine-year monthly allowance administered by the City of Pistoia, which in the following seven-year term allowed him to deepen his architectural studies, including through several trips in Italy and abroad (he himself mentions a stay in Paris and a tour that extended to Africa).

In 1881, the year in which he was awarded at the Milan National Exhibition for the restoration project of Pistoia’s municipal palace, he settled in the Lombard capital, where in 1883, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor at the Scuola superiore d’arte applicata all’industria, a post that would lead to the demise of the Dal Gallo benefit. Melani, choosing deliberately not to devote any part of his time to public offices, thus dedicated his life entirely to studies, both of architecture and, following the evolving development of Italian manufactures and industries, of applied arts, which would result in an impressive number of publications and teaching, until he became director of the same school. Among his pupils were the modernist architect Giuseppe Sommaruga and the Turin-born Francesco Gianotti, author of the famous Güemes Gallery in Buenos Aires.

From 1883 onward, his vocation as an art critic firmly consolidated and he gained wide fame thanks to his publicistic activity, especially through the hugely successful series of art manuals published by Hoepli. These books enjoyed substantial circulation both in number of titles and in how many new editions were released, always updated, and their value lay both in their pioneering role as the first Italian publications on artistic culture brought to a national market still limited to foreign-language repertoires, and in the critical perspective that animated them, always aimed at directing young artists’ research toward experimentation, in the name of an expressive freedom that sought to free itself from neoclassical academicism. In this tradition lies also the invitation, for architects, to study Gothic architecture not to copy it but to draw from it the sense of the original organic composition, as well as the invitation to bring beauty to new “subjects” that were enlarging the contemporary architectural program (industrial factories, public housing, housing for workers, garages, cinemas).

Participating in contemporary debate in a militant way, not hesitating to express open polemics and not excluding names such as Daniele Donghi, Luca Beltrami, Boito himself, Melani also collaborated with numerous Italian and foreign journals. Alongside the impressive volume of official publicistic work stands the edition written under the pseudonym “Helvetius,” as well as the activity as a lecturer.

Very notable is also the range of architectures designed, among which one recalls: the funerary shrine for Professor Carlo Burci (1813-1875) in the Misericordia cemetery in Florence, circa 1880; the restoration project, completed in a stylistic manner, of the façade of Pistoia’s town hall; the project for the façade of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia and that for the façade of the Milan Cathedral, published in Ricordi di Architettura, 1886; Villa Rosa (today Tedeschi) at Corlanzone (Alonte), in the province of Vicenza, 1908; the Merli-Maggi chapel in Milan’s monumental cemetery, published in L’Architettura italiana of 1910.

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