Giuseppe Cassioli

Giuseppe Cassioli was born to Amos, of whom he was a painting pupil, and to Lucrezia Chiari. For sculpture he was a pupil of Tito Sarrocchi. In 1885 he exhibited the painting Gilliat's Fight against the Octopus at the exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Siena (Florence, private collection), inspired by the novel The Workers of the Sea by Victor Hugo. He worked in the monumental hall of the Palazzo Comunale of Siena. In 1886 he participated in the exhibition of the Promotrice Fiorentina with the painting Light of the harem (Florence, private collection). In 1900 he made the monument of Gioachino Rossini in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence and other monuments for Bogota in Colombia, he also made large decorations for the Stock Exchange hall in Odessa, statues, medallions, bas-reliefs, decorations of the new façade of the Cathedral of Arezzo, all the paintings found in the church of the Seven Holy Founders in Florence, the chapel of the Seventh Centenary in Montesenario. In 1925 he executed the altarpiece with the Sacred Heart of Jesus between Santa Margherita Maria Alacoque and Santa Geltrude in the metropolitan church of San Pietro in Bologna. He taught drawing at the Florentine branch of the Gualandi Institute, where he painted the painting L'Effetà (Jesus healing the deaf-mute of the Decapolis). In 1928 he created the medal for the awards ceremony of the Amsterdam Olympics, a medal which remained in use until the 2000 Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney. His is the bronze door of the right portal of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence: the work was so difficult, as the artist had suffered criticism, harassment, misfortune and misery over the long years of his work, that in placing a self-portrait of himself, in one of the heads of the right wing, he retreated, suffocated by a snake.