1932–1939: the final years
The years from 1932 to 1939 represent the final creative season of Alimondo Ciampi. Despite illness and progressive physical weakness, the sculptor continued to work intensely, creating some of his most powerful and deeply significant works.
Exhibitions in the early 1930s
In 1932 Ciampi was elected by fellow artists to serve on the selection jury for the annual Montecatini exhibition organized by the Florentine Society of Fine Arts. At the same exhibition he presented seven sculptures, including a new marble version of The Abandoned, the large bronze Dancer, and the Portrait of ophthalmologist Bardelli.
In 1933 he exhibited in Turin at the Lombardi Art Gallery with thirty-nine sculptures. Between November and December of that year he held a solo exhibition in Florence, presenting sixty-four works.
Critics praised his bronze and terracotta portraits for their originality and expressive strength, identifying works such as Graziella as examples of remarkable refinement.
Exhibitions, commissions and funerary sculpture
In 1934 Ciampi participated in the Seventh Interprovincial Tuscan Art Exhibition with the portrait The Gardener. During the same period he also held a solo exhibition in Montecatini, showing works such as Sunbather and the portrait of Marshal of Italy Pecori Giraldi.
His funerary commissions also continued: a bronze version of The Lost Children was installed on the Gaiani tomb in Monza.
In 1935 he exhibited again in Montecatini, at the entrance of the Teatro Verdi, showing works including The Abandoned, Dancer, Ocarina and Mother. That same year he moved both home and studio to a spacious new atelier in Via Mannelli.
The final major works
In 1936 Ciampi participated in the Montecatini exhibition and also exhibited at the Rotta Gallery in Genoa. He created a bronze group of three figures for the Pagano tomb in Milan and two bronze busts for the Boschi tomb in Soffiano.
In 1937 the first symptoms of angina pectoris appeared. Despite the concern of family and friends, Ciampi did not slow his work. Illness seemed only to intensify his need to create.
Even in illness, Ciampi continued to pursue
an ideal of beauty stronger than physical fragility.
1938: Self-Portrait and Sleeping Girl
On January 17, 1938, he was appointed Emeritus Academician of the Royal Academy of the Arts of Drawing.
That same year he sculpted in marble Sleeping Girl, a life-size figure of extraordinary softness and refined modeling.
Alongside it he created a new Self-Portrait, an intense and moving work, solemn and powerful. Signing once again “Alimondo Ciampi of San Mauro,” he seemed to reconnect the beginning and end of his artistic journey.
In his final Self-Portrait,
Ciampi holds the sculptor’s tools in his hands:
a symbol of labor, vocation,
and a lifetime devoted to art.
Both works were presented in Montecatini in a solo exhibition of fifty-three sculptures. At the Florentine Society of Fine Arts exhibition, Sleeping Girl, also referred to as Sleeping Child, received first prize: the last gold medal of Ciampi’s career.
1939 and the final Spring
In 1939, despite strict medical orders to rest, Ciampi continued working. He sculpted the powerful bronze Peasant and continued exploring childhood through Crying Child, perhaps his final marble.
Between July and September he took part in the Livorno Prize with the Self-Portrait. It would be his final major public exhibition.
His last major work was a life-size female figure representing Spring. The subject became almost symbolic: renewal, rebirth and vital energy.
The sculpture was nearly complete when another angina attack struck him while returning from the studio. Unable to speak, he wrote to his family asking them to cast the clay of Spring in plaster.
Alimondo Ciampi died on December 8, 1939,
shortly after his sixty-third birthday,
in his home in Por Santa Maria.
After his death
Many tributes followed his passing. The City of Florence granted land for burial at the cemetery of the Porte Sante, where bronzes of the final Self-Portrait and Saint John the Baptist as a Child would later be placed.
In April 1940 the Florentine Society of Fine Arts dedicated a commemorative exhibition to him.
The destruction of the studio and the rescue of the works
After the artist’s death, an important part of his production remained in the Via Mannelli studio and in the family home along Lungarno Serristori. During the Allied bombings of 1944, the Campo di Marte studio was struck and partially destroyed.
Documents, drawings, letters, catalogues and many sculptures were lost. But many works were saved from the rubble by family members, especially his daughter Gemma Ciampi Butini and his grandsons Giorgio and Tiziano Butini.
The surviving marbles, bronzes, terracottas and plasters were transported through the city using improvised means, even with two bicycles connected by wooden boards.
These rescued works later became the core of family collections and donations to museums, including Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama .
The survival of many of Ciampi’s works
is owed to the determination of his daughter Gemma
and her sons Giorgio and Tiziano Butini,
who protected and preserved them
through the most difficult years of war.