Leoncillo Leonardi, born in Spoleto in 1915, is one of the most important European sculptors of the post-war period. He had the great merit of revitalizing such an ancient Italian artisanal tradition as that of ceramics. He won the gold medal for applied art at the7th Milan Triennial in 1940 with his first ceramics fired in Umbrian kilns. He soon began to take part in the Roman art scene where he became friends with Ettore Colla, Renato Guttuso, Toti Scialoja and Giulio Turcato. In 1946 he was among those who signed the “Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana” manifesto and later took part in the first show of the “Fronte nuovo delle arti” movement which, immediately after the war, was internationally considered to be the real representative Italian avant-garde. In 1954 he is at the Venice Biennale, where he returned to exhibit in 1948, 1950, 1952, 1960 and 1968; he was asked to exhibit in a single room together with Lucio Fontana and here he revealed his close relationship to the abstract art Fontana was developing during that period.

In 1956 he began a severe revision of his work in the direction of a progressive abandonment of references to post-Cubism. The results of this phase were gathered together in 1957 in the artist’s solo show at Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga, the meeting point in Rome of such international artists as Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder. In the meantime, the relationship established since 1957 with Bruno Sargentini and the Galleria L'Attico was consolidated. The one-man show inaugurated on October 25, 1958 in Via del Paradiso in Rome offered an overview of the most significant results of the previous months. Then he was developing expressive ways increasingly far from figuration. His sculptures were characterized ceramics in primary colors (black, white, burnt/red sienna), often shot across by deep furrows. His works alluded to a nature populated by gashed forms as well as by martyred, crucified, and mutilated human bodies.