Biography
Celestino Celestini (b. Città di Castello, Italy 1882 – d. Florence, Italy 1961) studied with the acclaimed Giovanni Fattori (1825 – 1908) at his Scuola del Nudo and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence between 1904-08 where, after a stint in Perugia, between 1912-53 he became the first professor of printmaking in Italy. In 1929, he also founded a school of stage design at the Accademia dei Fidenti in Florence. He founded the journal Calcografia and became internationally renowned both as an etcher and a stage designer, having been inspired by the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), whom he’d met in Florence in 1906. Celestini was elected member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, Society of the Salon d'Automne (1921), and the Société Internationale de la Gravure Originale en Noir, Paris (1922) where he exhibited regularly. He also had an exhibition in London at the Brook Street Gallery in 1933. Celestini regularly spent his summers in Anticoli Corrado, south of Rome and many of his prints are of the hill towns of central Italy.
