The Lions by Arturo Martini

Guarding the entrance to the historic building on the Bocconi campus are a lioness and lion: these two green sandstone sculptures created by Arturo Martini can be found in the lobby of Via Sarfatti 25.  

The two statues for Bocconi University are part of a group of works created for Milan’s public and urban spaces. When Pagano’s building was inaugurated in December 1941, Arturo Martini – who, ten years earlier, had won first prize for sculpture at the I Quadriennale in Rome – had already been working on major public commissions in the city from 1937 until 1939, and presented his first exhibition of paintings in Milan during the same year.                                              

Born in Treviso in 1889 to an extremely humble family, Arturo Martini started working at a goldsmith shop as a young boy and from there, his passion for ceramics was born. After visiting Monaco (1909) and Paris (1911), he traveled to Rome after the war and joined the artistic movement ‘Valori Plastici’. After the great works of the 1940s, he almost completely abandoned sculpture, saying that it had become a “dead language” for him. He passed away in 1947 in Milan.