The very first time I met Francesco Giannini, I realized that he Was an artist of great sensibility, with considerable cultural background and well established experience in the field of art. Our conversation soon developped on artistic themes, and Giannini expressed himself clearly with observations and comparisons which he put forward without exaggeration or prevarication.
 

Francesco Giannini studied art at famous Brera Academy in Milan, under Professors Alfredo Mantica, Gino Moro and Russo, and gained further experience while working in collaboration with Maestro Federico Bellomi. His style of painting has developped as vivacious and explosive, due to his use of shades of orange and winey tones of deep indigo, all dissolved in a light which seems to break away, creating an impression of mistery.
 

But above all, his skills in drawing, in his landscape creations and in his paintings of scenes of everyday life, prevail with force, leaving their mark on figures and background.
 

A personal, intimate world emerges from his work, making its appearence through visions absorbed and transformed, in the reappraisal of the Old Masters for the present-day realisation.
 

He has demonstrated many times that he can meet with courage the challenge of working on vast surfaces, such as the murals in Monza near Milan, and the baptismal font in the parish church of Oliosi near Verona, and the works he has carried  out, as a team worker, in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, meeting in full the requirements of the client, without relinquishing his personal style in both classical and modern techniques.
 

Furthermore, the enthousiastic inspiration he derives from religious subjects reveals the pronounced humanity and religious sentiment of the artist, capable of comunicating his message of faith with a great intellectual honesty witch transports him to the heart of matter, freeing his work from the often suffocating rigors of written and established rules.
 

Despite our modern-day tendency towards secularization, Giannini’s perception of sacredness reveals his passion and his expression of beauty as the message of dialogue between the author, God and the public. I do not think I would be mistaken in affirming that certain details of the great work recently accomplished for the Benedictine monastery in Manila refer back to past works when the predilection for the figurative subject contributed to the transmission of values, not only as a religious or aesthetic gesture, but also as an anguished prayer and impassioned catharsis.
 

During the course of his work, Francesco has at times sensed the limits of traditional pictorial representation which could be too “didactic”, but through his choice of methodology and symbols he has achieved a masterpiece rich in narrative value, which is not only highly aestetic but, above all, mystic.
 

For many years now I have been extremely proud to acknowledge him as an esteemed member of the Ancient Society of Fine Arts of Verona, founded in 1857, whose statute admits and gives value to the talents of local artists who are engaged in the propagation and exploitation of culture and artistic taste.