Piglets

Guido Cacciapuoti
Piglets
1913-14, terracotta
A group of piglets huddles together at mealtime: some, with their snouts on the ground, waste no time in consuming their food, others try to make room for themselves by pushing and stepping over their siblings to find a better spot. Piled at one end of the base, the animals form a quivering mass that effectively conveys the excitement of the moment: the sense of movement is enhanced by the arrangement of the small pigs and the alternating lines, parallel and perpendicular, formed by the different figures. The modeling is, at the same time, eloquent: Cacciapuoti molds the animals so that their bodies seem to detach themselves-almost in a formal continuum-from the mud in which they fight.
Next to Scrofa with piglets, which is almost coeval, the composition is an example of the spontaneity and inventiveness enacted by the artist through terracotta: his familiarity with the material, inherited from family tradition, allowed him to engage in fruitful experimentation with models in the Treviso years, creating an original repertoire from which he would draw extensively in the years to follow.
Like Gallo e gallina, Maialini is also made around 1913. Thanks to the intervention of his friend Arturo Martini, who introduced him to Nino Barbantini, secretary of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Cacciapuoti exhibited in that year at the group show at Ca' Pesaro. It was an extraordinary edition in terms of the quality of the interventions, as well as at the center of numerous controversies drawn by the modernity of the research, such as that of Martini and Gino Rossi, which was generically and disparagingly called “futurist.” Cacciapuoti presents there a group of terracottas depicting farm animals and exotic species (Gazelles, Elephants, Tigers), which critics appreciate for “vigor and great effectiveness of modeling.”
The artist would return to exhibit in Venice only in 1920, on the occasion of the International Biennial; the following year he moved to Milan where he opened the firm “Grès d'arte Cacciapuoti” with his brother Mario.