Like many of his Italian brothers of the brush, Ezio Marzi has eclectic tendencies and a most versatile workmanship. But what places him apart from his confrères who also imitate the art of the past, is the fact that when he chooses to be Ezio Marzi in his painting, that is to say to paint something of his own, giving a true expression of his own personality, he can do so without infection from reminiscences of his workmanship as an imitator. In a word, Marzi is a painter of mark, extremely original and fully temperamental—a rare thing among imitators of other people’s art. As regards his plagiaristic indulgences, he has tried the most varied and dissimilar schools of the past, successfully too. His preference, however, for Dutch or Flemish art has finally prevailed. Possibly at his first essays Marzi was the obvious sort of imitator, servile to direct suggestion of form, disguising artistic thefts from old masters by the usual well-matched mosaic, but now this inevitable preparatory period is dismissed and surpassed. When imitating Teniers this artist is really composing Dutch scenes without a scrap of suggestion in his studio.
Portrait.
An imitation of Dutch School by Prof. Ezio Marzi an Italian artist, who does his work with no apparent sense of plagiarism, but who is so versatile in Dutch School that but for his honest dealing he might prove a danger to amateurs.
While Marzi affords us a good type of the imitator in painting and Bastianini and Zampini show us the best possibilities of assumed characters in sculpture, Professor Orlandini of Florence imitates Quattrocento ornamental sculpture with capital results. We can repeat here the same comment passed on Marzi’s art: his works, too, are sold as modern, but, alas, how many ornamental chimneypieces and would-be aged lavabos now decorating rooms, are Orlandini’s work, although ostentatiously shown as pure productions of the Renaissance. Not so pure, though, always, for Professor Orlandini is at times forced to fall in with the customer’s ambition and thus allows himself to give full play to over-ornamentation, producing a sort of Quattrocento usus Americanus.
Still, when left to his own artistic bent we know of no one who can turn out of the Fiesole stone an aristocratic-looking chimneypiece more closely resembling the work of Desiderio da Settignano.
As a brief observation it may be added that Professor Orlandini is a sculptor of the old school who deals chiefly with hard materials. This fact greatly contributes to give his art that stern sobriety of line that is a characteristic mark of the Renaissance artist.
In the present flood of imitations it has been urged that honest artists should put their signatures to their modern antiques, thus preventing the danger represented by imitations when launched on the market by able imposters. There are a few who do sign their productions, but we must say such an act does not win the deserved success. The buyer seems to demand a certain amount of illusion which would inevitably be destroyed by a signature in full sight. Besides, supposing that to prevent any possible fakery all imitators should decide to sign their work, what guarantee would such a movement represent? Nothing is easier to erase than a signature on a painting, and so far as a sculptor is concerned it is a baby trick to cover the artist’s mark.
Commerce has its risks, risks placing an elective stigma on any enterprise, rendering it more difficult and eliminating the incapable. In our artistic milieu such risks are doubled, thus while “imitation,” and its black sister “faking,” represent a formidable danger, they also, through the said magnified risk, confer upon the elect ones, the true connoisseurs, the exclusiveness of an aristocratic caste.
And yet, unlike the beginner, these superior beings who have in a way learned through experience how to cope with dangerous odds repeat with Bonnaffé: