Italian, 1869–1944
Giovanni Maria Mataloni (1869–1944) was an Italian poster designer and illustrator, an exponent of the Stile Liberty, the Italian Art Nouveau, and, with Leonetto Cappiello, Adolfo Hohenstein, Leopoldo Metlicovitz and Marcello Dudovich, one of the fathers of the modern Italian poster. Born in Rome into a family of noble origins whose paternal side owned paper mills at Pioraco in the Marche, he soon won international recognition: one of his posters, for the Auer gas-mantle company (1895), was reproduced in the celebrated series Les Maîtres de l'Affiche.
He worked for Ricordi and De Agostini, for the publishers Chappuis of Bologna and Bocca of Turin, and for the magazines L'Illustrazione Italiana and La Tribuna Illustrata, as well as the Palermo daily L'Ora. Among his best-known posters are those for the newspaper La Tribuna (1897), the Associazione Artistica Internazionale in Rome and the inauguration of the Simplon Tunnel (1906). He held the chair of life drawing at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where Umberto Boccioni was among his students, and in 1908 he painted frescoes in the Gran Caffè Faraglia on Piazza Venezia and in the Palazzo dell'Agricoltura.
Little is known of his later life. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked for the cartographic department of De Agostini, and in his last years he devoted himself to delicate pastel portraits, especially of women and children. He died in Rome on 21 September 1944 and is buried in the Verano cemetery.
2 artworks
