Biography

Rosella Segreto was the model for his portrait "The Beautiful Italian" (La Bella Italiana) (1951).

Was given a full state Italian funeral and interred in the monumental cemetery at San Miniato al Monte, overlooking Florence.

His works have been bought by the most important museums in the world: the Uffizi Gallery, Modern Art Gallery, and Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle and the National Portrait Gallery of London,England; the Vatican Museums in Rome, Italy.

Selected portraits by Annigoni appeared as TIME covers: Oct. 5, 1962 Pope John XXIII; Nov. 1, 1963 Ludwig Erhard; Apr. 12, 1968 Lyndon B. Johnson.

Works include portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Pope John XXIII, John F. Kennedy, the Shah of Iran, legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn, the Maharanee of Jaipur, Italian writer Luigi Ugolini, prodigious poet Vanna Bonta as a young girl, and self-portraits.

Impulse alone does not make a work of art.

The emotional states which a painter or other artist feels irresistibly forced to express are those most intimate states of mind and soul from which may be struck the spark or revelation, kindling a light that shows things in their deepest, most universal, and perhaps even eternal reality; this light we may call the light of poetry.

It is as if an artist had within himself a kind of refinery in which to process the raw material of his life, the personal and public experiences, memories, aspirations, everyday work, dreams, doubts, the disappointments and excitements of his pilgrimage through the chaotic labyrinth of the world, and that in doing so, he aims to find himself, to discover the outlines of his own being, to take that heap of desperate, elusive and often contradictory sensations, and forge them into a transcendent meaning.

I had recourse to a dictionary of synonyms, and there I found "deformed" in the company with such terms as "ugly, foul, loathsome, obscene," and read moreover that "to deform is to make something ugly in form.

Ineptitude has today, it seems, acquired full rights of citizenship in the realm of art.