A West Virginia researcher who lent his collection of works by the Italian artist Ezio Anichini for a major exhibit at the University of Dayton in 2022 has donated the works to the Marian Library.
John Shaffer, who retired in 2017 as director of arts programming at the State University of New York at Oswego, began building the collection after seeing illustrations the artist had done for Dante’s Divine Comedy. When he discovered that the Marian Library had one of the few copies in the world of a book featuring Anichini’s work, he reached out for more information. So began a collaboration that resulted in the exhibit A Vision of Art and Faith: The Litany of Loreto and the Work of Ezio Anichini (1886-1948). Selected items in the collection have been digitized and are now available for browsing in eCommons, the University’s institutional repository.
Anichini’s ‘Illustrative’ Life
Anichini was born in 1886 in Florence, Italy. The son of a noted artist, Anichini studied figurative drawing and sculpture, developing a highly detailed art nouveau style. Starting in 1903, when Anichini was 17, the Italian cultural magazine Scena Illustrata began featuring Anichini’s art on its covers. Between 1903 and 1930, he contributed at least 79 cover illustrations to the magazine.
In 1906, Anichini won a competition for cover designs for a new Italian children’s magazine, Il giornalino della Dominica. Anichini’s winning design features a Nativity scene from the perspective of the angels and a shepherd. The unique image shows the stable, windows glowing, in the background while the angels and shepherd look on in the foreground, Shaffer and former Marian Library director Sarah Cahalan wrote in “Crickets, Toads and Fairy Tales,” a 2022 blog.
Anichini’s Religious Imagery
One of Anichini’s best known works is his series of 46 illustrations of the titles of Mary from the Litany of Loreto, a traditional Catholic prayer. In Catholic tradition, the Holy House of Loreto is Mary’s home, which some accounts say was transported by angels from Nazareth to Loreto, Italy, in medieval times. Anichini’s illustrations of these titles first appeared in a 1912 issue of Scena Illustrata and were also made available for purchase as a set of postcards “collected in an elegant case,” Shaffer wrote in a 2019 article in the Marian Library Newsletter. The illustrations enjoyed such popularity that they were later published in book format in 1912 and 1930. The 1930 edition includes reflections on the illustrations from Italian church leaders, including Cardinal Pietro Maffi.
After the success of his Litany of Loreto images, Anichini completed a set of illustrations honoring the 600th anniversary of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, or Divine Comedy. Released in 1918, the 52 images show all three stages of Dante’s journey: hell, purgatory and paradise. The Divine Comedy was an important religious text for Italy — but also an important political and patriotic text that helped define Italian identity, said Eve Wolynes, a former Marian Library staff member who helped curate the 2022 exhibit. Although Italians used hundreds of dialects well into the 1800s, the influence of the poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, who all wrote in the Tuscan dialect, eventually led to the Tuscan dialect becoming the official language of unified Italy, Wolynes wrote in a blog promoting the exhibit.
War and His Works
World War I brought a new dimension to Anichini’s art. He created several postcard illustrations that commemorated the work and sacrifice of the Italian military and its medical providers. A subset of Anichini’s work in the 1920s and 1930s continued to reflect the political climate in Italy at the time. We do not know Anichini’s personal political convictions, but as Italian fascism rose in the 1930s, Anichini’s art often drew on classical themes from ancient Rome to emphasize Italy’s long history and its envisioned destiny. “The rhetoric of Imperial Rome became justification for a new imperial Italy in the 1930s,” Wolynes noted in another blog. “Mare nostrum (‘our sea’) — the term used in Rome for the entitlement to control of the Mediterranean and imperial expansion — — was taken up once more, this time by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and other nationalists to justify Italian colonialism and expansion in North Africa over 2,000 years later.” Anichini’s art at this time often used romanità — “Roman-ness” — themes, intertwined with religious imagery. In one example, Anichini drew an allegorical Italia in a pose that echoed that of the Virgin Mary as “Speculum Justitiate,” or “Mirror of Justice,” in his Litany of Loreto illustrations.
Little is known about Anichini’s personal life, and no photographs of him survive. Laura Orvieto, an author for whom Anichini illustrated several books, wrote, “Ezio Anichini had a true talent as an illustrator and a keen eye for color; while socially he seemed out of touch, inept and immature like a poor, miserable child.” However, Anichini’s publisher at Il giornalino della Domenica wrote a more flattering description — that he was “one of the best and most loyal of our illustrators; one of those who, from the very first issues, to the greatest joy and delight of our readers and friends, have dedicated all their care and all their art skills to embellishing the Giornalino.” Anichini died in 1948.
Shaffer’s Quest
Despite Anichini’s relative fame in Italy in the early 20th century, he is not well known today. His art may have remained little known and studied if not for Shaffer, who shared about his years of research in a 2022 Dayton Daily News feature about a display of rare needlework reproductions of Anichini works.
Shaffer’s efforts to make Anichini better known have begun to bear fruit. Shaffer and Cahalan published an article on Anichini in the Italian journal Erba d’Arno, and a new catalog from the Scuola Grande di San Marco of Venice highlights Anichini’s work in an essay by Maria Agense Chiari, who cites Shaffer’s work and the Marian Library blogs about Anichini.
The John Shaffer Collection on the Works of Ezio Anichini, 1886-1948, which contains more than 250 items, can be viewed during the Marian Library’s open hours, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Appointments are preferred. Researchers may also view the collection’s finding aid and Shaffer’s original collection inventory at the University of Dayton’s Archives Catalog.
— Stephanie Shreffler is an associate professor and a religious collections librarian and archivist in the Marian Library.
The featured image is a detail of a "Scena Illustrata" cover by Anichini.
Resources
- Cahalan, Sarah, and John Shaffer. 2022. “Crickets, Toads, and Fairy Tales.”
- Moss, Meredith. Aug. 6, 2022. “Rare needle artwork on exhibit in Dayton, Columbus,” Dayton Daily News.
- Shaffer, John. 2019. “Ezio Anichini: Creative Knight Errant of the Ideal.”
- Wolynes, Eve. 2022. “Anichini’s Divine Comedy.”
- Wolynes. 2022. “Anichini’s Rome.”