The reddish-orange glow lighting up the sky reverberates on the landscape of Mount Amiata and wraps the severe structure of the castle high on the hill in a warm atmosphere. As in many other pictures painted from life on summer days, the artist expresses his affectionate observation of nature’s spectacles, ever changing and emotionally stirring to his attentive, sensitive eye.
Arcidosso Castle at Sunset
Vittorio Granchi
Florence, 20 October 1908 – 30 November 1992
Vittorio Granchi, after studying at the art school in Santa Croce and the art institute at Porta Romana in Florence, began a multifaceted career. He decorated wooden furniture for his father’s shop, made Art Deco batiks, painted easel paintings, and decorated domestic interiors with Giovanni Tolleri and ships with the architect Carlo Coppedè. During those same years he attended courses in life drawing of nudes at the Accademia, frequented the Circolo degli Artisti and the Giubbe Rosse café, and initiated an intense artistic collaboration with Dino Bausi, Ermanno Toschi, Ugo Pignotti, and Francesco Pagliazzi.
In 1934 he was asked by Ugo Procacci to work in the restoration department of the Superintendence of the Galleries of Florence, where he rose to a prestigious position. During World War II Granchi worked tirelessly to defend the art works in Florence and its surrounding territory, while at the same time describing the havoc wreaked by German mines on the area around the Ponte Vecchio in a series of tragic canvases painted from the windows of the Uffizi. After the flood in 1966, together with Umberto Baldini and other colleagues in the restoration department, Granchi performed highly skilled “surgery” on damaged art works, including the very delicate operation on Comabue’s Crucifix.
Granchi never abandoned easel painting, with a special interest in landscape; among his favorite horizons were those of Maremma and Mount Amiata, where his wife was born and where he regularly spent vacations until his final one in 1992.
