Leonardo: Annual Magazine of the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School. New York: Leonardo da Vinci Publishing House, MCMXXV [1925].

Leonardo: Annual Magazine of the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School. New York: Leonardo da Vinci Publishing House, MCMXXV [1925].

This is the only "annual" like this for this important school for working men and women - that is, there were night (as well as day) classes for those who had other daytime jobs. Connections to writers in the Collection are many: e.g., the Collection's copy of Arturo Giovannitti's Quando Canta il Gallo was inscribed by Giovannitti to his good friend (and wife Lucia), Onorio Ruotolo, the sculptor and teacher at the the school. Though there were many Italian students, the school's most famous graduate was sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Besides advertisements that no doubt paid both for the publication of this "annual" and also the school itself, this large format volume is full of fine reproductions of drawings and paintings of many students of the school.

Contributors in Italian whose works are to be found in the Collection include Agostino De Biasi (Il Carroccio), Giovannitti, Franco Lalli, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Italo Stanco,  Francesca Sisca and Gianni Viafora.

Contributors in English include Pascal D'Angelo and Robert Ferrari, as well as Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Helen Keller, and Al Smith.

The school boasted, as is apparent in the later (1932) Bulletin that accompanies this item, that it was a school for applied, as well as fine arts. So in addition to drawing, painting and sculpture, the school's day and evening classes included wood-carving, cabinet making and wrought iron.

A full-page, favorable review of this annual appears at p. 28 of the May 15, 1925 issue of Ernesto Valentini's Zarathustra, q.v. in the Collection. A later issue of the same magazine (February 15, 1926, q.v. in the Collection) has an intriguing article about why Onorio Ruotolo left  the school.

Onorio Ruotolo

Francesca Vinci Roman

33x25cm; 128 p.