Art: ELEGANT SIMPLICITY

THE Archbishop of Salzburg raised his golden crosier, traced a great cross, murmured a blessing, then turned to the crowd and said: “It is done.” As applause spattered across the courtyard in front of the Renaissance-baroque Salzburg Cathedral, one sturdy little man who was watching broke into a smile. For Italian Sculptor Giacomo Manzù, 49, the dedication one day last week of the 6,600-Ib. bronze doors for the cathedral ceremoniously closed the book on three years of intense, painstaking work.

Perhaps Manzù’s greatest work, the doors (opposite) bear four bas-reliefs representing four saints of charity. They show St. Martin of Tours cutting his cape on an icy night to share it with Jesus, appearing as a beggar (upper left); St. Severinus, who died near Salzburg, helping a woman out of prison during a Hun invasion (upper right); the execution of St. Engelbert Kolland (lower left); and St. Francis offering his cloak (lower right). In the center a sheaf of wheat and a cluster of vines, symbolizing the bread and wine of the Eucharist, serve as the door handles. Like Manzù’s bronze cardinals and Christs, the doors are conceived in the tradition of early Greece and the Renaissance, executed in an elegant, classically simple style.

While Manzù says that form—and not religion—is his chief interest, the church has been a major factor in his career. His interest in art was awakened in the church in his native city of Bergamo, Italy, across the Alps from

Salzburg, where he watched his father serve as sacristan. The boy was fascinated by the flow of robes and the carefully poised stance of church dignitaries. At seven he tried to translate his impressions into clay figures, remembers: “I knew then I wanted to be a sculptor.”

The eleventh of twelve children, Giacomo had little formal training, after the third grade went to work as a stonecutter, house painter, plasterer. He eventually managed to save for a month’s trip to Paris, where he spent nights on park benches, days in the Louvre. In 1938 he turned out the first of his now famous cardinal series. “They interested me not because of their religious content,” he says, “but because of their form and line. In a way they are my abstractions.” Last year Manzù, who destroys the mold after a single cast, created what he considers the last of his cardinals, because they “have lost meaning for me, have become too empty, too easy.”

For 14 years Manzù taught at Milan’s Brera Academy (“You can’t teach art, only techniques”), now works in a whitewashed, high-ceilinged studio on the city’s outskirts, specializes in the figures of dancers (see overleaf). He is also at work on bronze bas-reliefs for the “Door of Death” (opened only for funerals) in St. Peter’s in Rome. While modern sculpture continues on its merry road to abstraction, Giacomo Manzù keeps to the realistic tradition. “I am a modernist,” he says, “but I do not deny the past.”