Giovanni Antonio Zamarin: the ‘normality’ of an artist

The universe of the history of Art and Architecture is studded with authors who, although they did not leave a significant mark with their work, contributed to the spread of ideas, styles, and trends deduced, often, from masters or avant-garde currents. Many years ago, we found on the antiques market some works by a then practically unknown Istrian artist, Giovanni Antonio Zamarin (Poreč 1885 – Istria? 1945), a ‘capo d’arte’ who had worked as a painter, decorator, poster designer, illustrator, set designer, costume designer, professor, perhaps architect and even boat builder. He was undoubtedly a multifaceted figure, an honest ‘craftsman’ in the various declinations of Art who, without any exalting feats or works, had managed to acquire a certain notoriety and esteem in his environment city and region. Zamarin was a refined draughtsman; his works as a decorator and poster designer show a taste for shapes and decorations that stemmed from his training in the Trieste schools inspired by the Viennese Secession. In painting, Zamarin reveals a taste for colours and shapes marked by Romanticism mediated through 19th-century verism; in his work as a set designer, the most interesting, he shows knowledge of the style of the Futurists, the settings of the Metaphysicians, the shapes of the Cubists, producing sketches of scenes that we can define as marked in a Cubist/Rationalist style. At the end of the war, in May 1945, he was taken prisoner to his Capodistria by the Yugoslav partisans. Since then, nothing more has been heard of him and his Art until the monographic exhibition dedicated to him in Trieste in 2015, organised by the I.R.C.I.