Tobiolo

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Tobiolo by Amleto Sartori, 1958
Piazzetta Garzeria
Padua, May 2025

“The sculpture ‘Tobias’ represents an emblematic moment in Sartori's artistic maturity, steeped in biblical and mythological imagery that reflects his passion for literature and the human condition. Made in 1958 as a full-relief bronze sculpture (approximately 1 meter tall), it depicts Tobias (or Tobiolo), the young protagonist of the Old Testament Book of Tobit, captured in the dynamic gesture of clutching a fish in his arms. This episode alludes to the miracle in which Tobias, guided by the Archangel Raphael, catches a fish in the Tigris River: from its entrails he will extract the gall that will cure his father Tobit's blindness. The figure is rendered with elegance and vitality: the boy's slender, athletic body, twisted, conveys muscular tension and a sense of imminent movement, as if the fish could escape at any moment. Sartori infuses the sculpture with a grace ‘possessed by the material’, where the bronze seems to come alive with an emotional storm – formal perfection combined with a playful cunning, echoing his theatrical masks. The work is part of a series of ‘heroic and mythological’ sculptures that Sartori produced in the postwar period, often in cast bronze, influenced by his exploration of form and gesture. Displayed in retrospective exhibitions (such as the 2015 one at the Galleria Cavour in Padua for the centenary of his birth), ‘Tobiolo’ is praised for its ability to ‘come alive in an instant’, symbolizing themes of salvation, youth, and divine intervention.” (Tobiolo, Grok)