In 1948 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti wrote an essay in the catalog of the exhibition Handicraft as a fine art in Italy curated by Bruno Munari, hosted at the House of Italian Handicraft in New York. Among the exhibited works also the ceramic vases by Fausto Melotti, who together with the works of Afro, Casorati, Consagra, de Pisis, Fontana, Fornasetti, Guttuso, Morandi and many others, wanted to demonstrate how in Italy the production of the so-called applied arts was to be considered in all respects fine art.

To commemorate that first encounter, on the twentieth anniversary of the General Catalog of Fausto Melotti's ceramics, the Ragghianti Foundation of Lucca is organizing the Fausto Melotti exhibition from 25 March to 25 June. Ceramics, curated by Ilaria Bernardi, a journey through the works of an absolute protagonist of the Italian artistic renewal of the twentieth century.

Sculptor, painter, draftsman and poet, Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 - Milan, 1986) was a refined ceramist and, from the second post-war period until the early 1960s, he found in this technique a tool for inventing and transforming his sculpture.

Made in collaboration with the Fausto Melotti Foundation and the MIC - International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, and with the contribution of the Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca Foundation and the patronage of the Tuscany Region and the Province and Municipality of Lucca, Fausto Melotti. The ceramics will be developed in four sections.

The first inserts and historicises Melotti's ceramic production within his life and his activity, through an illustrated chronology that goes from his birth in 1901 to his death in 1986. The chronology will be accompanied by showcases to house important documents from his archive specifically linked to ceramic production, including three of his notebooks that have never been exhibited before.

The second section will be dedicated to the best-known types of ceramic sculptures conceived by the artist: from ceramics of a sacred nature to bas-reliefs, from animals to female figures, from the so-called UN to the Theaters. Among the works on display is the precious Letter to Fontana (1944), exhibited in 1950 at the Venice Biennale.

In the third section the video In first person. Painters and sculptors. Fausto Melotti (1984), by Antonia Mulas, includes the only interview in which the artist, analyzing his own career and his conception of art, talks about ceramics.