Giulio Aristide Sartorio  (b Rome, 11 Feb 1860; d Rome, 3 Oct 1932).

Italian painter, printmaker, writer and teacher.

His grandfather and father were both sculptors and painters. He briefly attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome under Francesco Podesti and then taught himself by studying works in local churches and museums. During this time he sold paintings and watercolours in a 17th-century style, and in 1879 he was able to take a studio in the Via Borgognona. In 1883 he exhibited the painting Malaria (later titled Death; Cordoba, Argentina, Mus. Prov. B.A. 'Emilio A. Caraffa'), which was inspired by the realism of Caravaggio and Ribera. The work was originally acquired by the critic Sommaruca, who employed Sartorio to illustrate his periodical Cronaca Bizantina. In 1889 Sartorio travelled with his friend Francesco Paolo Michetti to Paris, where he was awarded a prize in the Exposition of that year and also became acquainted with the Barbizon school. He began to produce paintings, etchings and lithographs of natural subjects, such as landscapes and animals (e.g. a lithograph of the Appian Way, 1892/6; see 1970-71 exh. cat., no. 10). As well as clearly being influenced by Symbolism and Art Nouveau, he studied the Pre-Raphaelites and in 1893 visited England, where he met John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and Arthur Hughes. From 1895 he began publishing articles on English painting in Il Convito. Between 1891 and 1895 he painted the triptych Wise and Foolish Virgins (Rome, Pal. Braschi), followed by the mythological diptych Gorgon and the Heroes (1893-8) and Diana of Ephesus (1895-8; both Rome, G.N.A. Mod.), which combine horrific imagery with a characteristic sensuality. His appreciation of the human form is exemplified in pastel studies (c. 1896; Rome, G.N.A. Mod.) for The Gorgon. In the late 1890s he taught at the School of Fine Arts of the Grand Duchy of Saxony in Weimar, had contacts with both Nietzsche and the German Symbolists and married the painter Giulia Bonn. On his return to Italy he devoted himself to his paintings of landscapes and animals, in particular horses, having co-founded in 1899 the group I Venticinque della Campagna Romana.