A Tribute to the Blacksmith

(written by Bruno Gonzato – President of Ind.i.a. spa based in Malo, Vicenza)

As it often happens, all started with a love gesture. On the 9th March of 15 years ago (it was the Father’s Day), my wife Stefania and our four children surprised me by giving me a nice wooden statue of a blacksmith as a present. It was made by an ice-cream maker from Schio whose passion was to carve a particular type of pine wood. I had already begun collecting some statues and prints on blacksmiths. They were nice pieces, but of scarce artistic content. Such wooden statue released in me the “spirit of the collector”. Since then, while travelling around the world to sell our Wrought Iron, I also started visiting antique dealers’ shops and small markets mainly looking for works of art dealing with blacksmiths. In the same period, my wife met Mrs Gusella, an antique dealer from Bassano that somehow got specialized on the subject to such an extent that she initially became my “pusher” (as I lovingly called her) of artistic statues and paintings on blacksmiths. By now, and through ways that are not yet clear to me, antique dealers and collectors all around Europe have heard that in Italy, in Veneto and precisely in Malo, there is a “fool” that collects works of art on blacksmiths. Therefore, as soon as they run into such types of objects, they get in touch with me, as it seems that my collection is UNIQUE IN THE WORLD. Of course, there might be a company that, in the seek of renewing its offices, might desire to add a piece of art, a painting or the statue of a blacksmith to add lustre to its history going back to the origins of the company, but it really seems that there is no other collection similar to mine. And I understand why! As a matter of fact, my collection is made of specific and rare pieces. Furthermore, except for the period of the “great industrial exhibitions”, from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the world of Wrought Iron lived a process of involution that surely did not help an hagiographic production on blacksmiths (firstly due to the introduction of the easy ornamental cast iron and then to Rationalism in Architecture).

In the last decades we have been busy to overcome such situation also thanks to the work of those people among us who kept fuelling the flame of an Ancient Art (Wrought Iron) that really risked to disappear while it now seems (actually, is) born again to a new life. As a matter of fact, every important Architect can not refrain from using artistic Wrought Iron in his projects. Sometimes, in the big monumental projects, Wrought Iron is considered as an “historical landmark”, but more often, in particular in the field of residential building industry, it is considerably used for his beauty and safety, the two features that the Blacksmith and Wrought Iron have been giving to men since the beginning. Therefore, I would like to thank also the City of Bassano del Grappa (a real big-small capital) that through its Culture, Show and Tourism Council and Museums Office immediately appreciated the general importance of this exhibition, and Mrs. Giuliana Ericani, the Director of the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa, that helped so much in giving to the exhibition the correct philological precision.