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Marco Foppoli's art of the Heraldic Ex Libris
of Alessandro Savorelli *
(Published in "Contemporary International ex-libris artists" Vol. III, 2004)
There are thousands of heraldic bookplates, north of the Alps and especially in the British Isles, somewhat fewer in Italy, but generally widespread everywhere. Sometimes heraldry is optional and the owner's coat of arms is inserted with difficulty, subordinate among drawings, sillouttes or allegories or stuck in a corner. The situation is sometimes imposed on the artist by the customer. At other times, the artist simply does not know how to represent a coat of arms. It is as if he feels the presence of a foreign body which forces him to appropriate something not truly his own. The artist does not know what style to employ or how to combine it with the overall design of the bookplate, where to place it on the page, what models to use for strange charges on the shield, etc. So, the outcome is not guaranteed success. Often the bookplate looks more like a wine label.
But, when we talk about a purely heraldic ex libris, the heraldic achievement lords it over everything else at the centre of the composition. It is its own genre, presupposing that the artist knows not only what the charges are, but can treat them confidently in their arrangement according to the language of the blason and with a pleasing style suitable to the dignity of the armiger. This does not come out of thin air, but presupposes a familiarity with the figures borne of exposure to various renditions, hundreds nay thousands, of inputs from graphic designers and a knowledge of different artistic styles and peculiarities of national heraldic traditions.
Finally you have to be able to choose a reference model: a certain author, a certain period, a certain geographical area, a tradition, a determinate instrument to imitate. It is not the same thing to make a pen sketch of a coat of arms, a miniature, arms carved in stone, a piece of pottery, a glass, a seal.
Each of these material supports or of reproduction techniques interprets standard heraldic language in different ways and gives different graphic results.
One sees this in many heraldic bookplates. The artist has not sufficiently worried about these problems. They rarely feel the need to graphically revivify a traditional design while remaining within a strictly proper heraldic aesthetic, because they are conditioned by technical limitations, by unfamiliarity with the range of expression available or lack of knowledge of heraldic traditions and national customs. They fear departing from customary and sometimes poor designs to create a vibrant and boldly colourful composition. To tell the truth, many heraldic bookplates give the painful impression of having been inspired by despair, hurriedness and a hodge-podge of designer additions, but completely lacking good balance or a clear perception of the beauty of arms and their function and purpose, or an awareness of the sheer variety of possible styles. It is as though they went to an heraldic supermarket for their iconographic images.
This has been a long introduction, but a necessary one. Marco Foppoli's bookplates, you see, literally reverse all the faults mentioned above. Marco's heraldic ex libris are really something else. Marco is familiar with the history and styles of heraldry for many nations and is an excellent judge of its playful and delightful medieval past with its canting or punning possiblities.He hasn't hesitated to carve out a tradition, and to reread it with a un-heterodox style, but with a very personal one. A high tradition, made even better by true masters.
Anyone familiar with the great heraldic masters of the last century will have no difficulty recognizing their stylistic elements in Foppoli's art. Just look at the work of Paul Boesch or Bruno B. Heim and you will see them reflected in Foppoli's work. This is perhaps not surprising, since this native of the Valtellina (a nice Alpine valley of North Lombardy, which was once a part of Switzerland from 1512-1797) was profoundly influenced by them in his training. But, I would even go further to look at the influence of the incomparable Otto Hupp a famous German heraldic artist whose life spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
From Boesch, Foppoli took his taste for neat composition and the pleasure of "surprise" which is a feature of northern illumination. However, in contrast to Boesch's polished déco, fine stroke and rigid geometrical masses, a sort of Bauhaus style applied to heraldry, Foppoli breaks the planes, subdivides them, creates highlights and flashes of colour, whereas Boesch is just shape and line.
From Heim, Foppoli has taken the swift stroke, without second thoughts and his irony in drawing with figures of men and animals humourously depicted in accord with Gothic icons and medieval tradition. It is exactly this ability to bring a smile to heraldry, to infuse the figures with a caricatural light stroke (without making them puppets) that is typical of the vitality of early medieval heraldry. Just look at those fierce and sexed lions and bears, those jittery feathered eagles displayed, those follicking lambs and compare them with the cold mechanical and lifeless creatures typically drawn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and you will see the nature of the problem of doing a great heraldic ex libris.
From Hupp, an extraordinary heraldic artist and calligrapher, who broke the conventions of the late nineteenth century standardizations, Foppoli borrows his expert engraving style with rapid and perfect artistry, recovering those stylistic elements and models that lend life to the heraldic ex libris, albeit in the tradition of the modern alpine Holzschnitterei.
In conclusion, Foppoli has given a contemporary expression to the talents of the Mitteleuropean heraldic masters filtered through the work of the Valtellina woodcarvers, the origins of his ancient family. He uses the brush as a gouge and a skiving knife, paper bristles up under the India Ink as if a wooden material. From the alpiner's gouges Foppoli draws alphabets that seem workshop signs, facetings that remind one of the decorations of Valtellina's slate roof houses of the Rezia. Boesch's rigour and graphic elements, jostle with Heim's pastel strokes in a wonderful mixture, not the stern Rhinelander Hupp's, but rather ranging from those of a Dalesman, more attached to pastoral Pyrenean heraldry (from a taste for totem sculptures) or to the Irish rouggedness.
Foppoli's coarse gouge restores the art of the heraldic ex libris to a little mountain air, a flavour of new wine and of an alpine tale that clashes with the dusty middle-class humdrum heraldry of nowadays.
* Alessandro Savorelli
Searcher and historian of the modern philosophy, he attends to the history of the symbology and heraldry of the public institutions, particularly of the civic heraldry.
A member of the Societé Suisse d¹héraldique and of the Académie internationale d¹héraldique, he regularly contributes to the Archives héraldiques swisses, to Vexilla Italica and to the review Medioevo (Roma).
In addition to several essays on the history and evolution of heraldry, in books and reviews, he¹s the author of: Piero della Francesca e l'ultima crociata. Araldica, storia e arte tra gotico e Rinascimento and, Il Palio di Siena e i suoi simboli (Firenze, 1999).
He cooperated with many bodies with the projects of redesign of the public heraldry for the regions Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, the municipal districts of Siena, Ferrara, Latisana, Florence.
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