Galileo Chini's Montecatini, a jewel of the early twentieth century

He was called there by the architect Giulio Bernardini to paint the vault of the Salone delle feste of the Grand Hotel La Pace, a building in which he would later also insert a beautiful entrance window and the interior decorations of the demolished café-theatre Palace Theatre in via Manin date back to the same period.

The years preceding Chini's third visit to the spa town, which took place between 1908 and 1910, were full of commitments, satisfactions and changes for the Artist.

His culture, which since his Florentine beginnings in the last decade of the nineteenth century he had kept thoroughly and anxiously updated through the study of international art magazines, had continuously enriched itself with direct experiences in the various European cultural contexts, which he had been able to internalize with a certainty of taste that clearly inserted him into the climate of the most sophisticated modernist and symbolist tendencies: without however revealing an easy attitude of slavish quotations, indeed maintaining a personality that was not only unmistakable but also singularly independent.

The concept, derived from the English theories of arts and crafts, that there were no expressive distinctions in the various artistic practices, had had few precedents in the rather traditionalist Italian environment ……. Chini, on the other hand, promoted, with his activity in the art of ceramics, a concept of industrially produced artistic work, widely distributed, with a very strong impact on customs and everyday taste: his ceramics were produced in large quantities and introduced into bourgeois homes an art nouveau taste among the highest in Europe, almost unheard of in Italy up to that time, just as his wall decorations emerged from the closed settings of the homes of intellectuals adepts of a sophisticated and exclusive taste, to spread into public environments (bank offices, hotels, theatres, temporary exhibitions), ……. These theories would be set out many years later in a Manifesto that Chini wrote in 1917 (“Renewing, let’s renew ourselves”), right next to the frescoes of the Municipality of Montecatini, in which he proposed the abolition of the Academies of Fine Arts that with their structure sanctioned the distinction between major arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) and minor arts, and the institution of “Industrial artistic schools aimed at renewing all forms of applied arts”.

In 1906 with his cousin Chino Chini, he founded the Manifattura Fornaci San Lorenzo in Borgo San Lorenzo after having left the Arte della Ceramica in 1904 due to differences with the new partner, Count Giustiniani, who had joined the company for purely economic reasons.

 

In 1907 at the VII° Venice Biennale, he set up the room “L’Arte del sogno” attracting the attention of the King of Siam who called him to Bangkok to decorate the Throne Palace.

 

In 1908 he organized and participated in the 1st Faenza Art Biennial, which gave rise to the current International Museum of Ceramics, and received the teaching assignment at the Corso Libero Superiore di Decorazioni at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

 

Chini returned to Montecatini to execute the entire decorative apparatus of the Terme Tamerici, expanded by architects Giulio Bernardini and Ugo Giusti. For the renovated establishment he created the designs for the windows, frescoes, floors, ceramics and stoneware panels in which the profusion of his beloved exotic elements anticipated the extraordinary experience that awaited him in Siam the following year.