Florence, 8 February 1945
At the high school of fine arts in Florence, Ceccotti had as a teacher Piero Vignozzi, who introduced him to the intellectual circles of Florence.
From 1971 he taught at the arts high school, but soon passed over to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, at the same time teaching drawing at the Università Internazione dell’Arte (UIA) in Florence. After presenting at the competition for the 20th Fiorino Prize works made using a Pop Art idiom borrowed from British and American artists, in 1974 he opened his first solo show, where he offered a visionary, poetic language inspired by English Romantic painting. In 1984 he met Leonardo Sciascia, who invited him to the “Artists and Writers” show at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan and organized a solo show for him in Palermo. From the 1980s on, he exhibited frequently, and alongside his paintings, graphic works became increasingly important, in which Ceccotti revealed a mastery of technique and a particularly inventive originality, so much so that in 1996 Maria Luisa Guaita called him to direct her famous Fondazione Il Bisonte international school of graphic arts in Florence. Ceccotti recalls that the first time he saw the sea was at San Vincenzo, in Maremma, and the love he felt for that area was so intense that he never let it go. The result is a number of particularly evocative and compelling landscapes, paintings, and engravings that were shown in 1998 at the Bisonte and in 2001 at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence in the show “Skies and Lands of Maremma.”
