Corrado Cagli

Corrado Cagli (Ancona, 1910–Rome, 1976) was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage, who lived in the USA during World War II.

Cagli was born in Ancona but he moved with his family to Rome in 1915 at the age of five.

In 1927, he made his artistic debut, with a mural painted on a building in Via Sistina. The following year, he made another mural painting in a hall in Via Vantaggio.

In 1932, he held his first personal exhibition at the Gallery of Art of Rome.

Together with other artists such as Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli, he formed the group "New Roman School of Painting," better known as Scuola Romana.

In 1937 and 1938, he exhibited works at the "Comet" gallery in New York.

In 1938, when Benito Mussolini stepped up the persecution of Jews, Cagli fled to Paris and later went to New York where he became a U.S. citizen.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was involved in the 1944 Normandy landings, and fought in Belgium and Germany.

He was with the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, and made a series of dramatic drawings on that subject.

Cagli

Cagli [ˈkaʎʎi] is a town and comune in the province of Pesaro e Urbino, Marche, central Italy. It c. 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Urbino. The Burano flows near the town.

History

Cagli occupies the site of an ancient village on the Via Flaminia, which seems to have borne the name Cale, 39 km (24 mi) north of Helvillum (now Sigillo) and 29 km (18 mi) southwest of Forum Sempronii (now Fossombrone).

In the 6th century it was one of the strongholds of the Byzantine Pentapolis. A free commune was founded in Cagli at the end of the 12th century, and it quickly subdued more than 52 surrounding castles, overthrowing the rural lords and threatening the feudal powers of the abbots. Its expansion established the borders of the diocese of Cagli. When the city was partially destroyed by fire, started by Ghibelline factions in 1287, the settlement was moved down from the slopes of Monte Petrano and rebuilt anew on flatter land, incorporating the pre-existing suburb. The rebuilding of the city, under the patronage of Pope Nicholas IV, followed Arnolfo di Cambio's grid-pattern town plan. Cagli soon returned to being a prosperous centre. A register of taxes paid to the Church in 1312, revised after a heavy fall in population due to famine, shows that Cagli then numbered around 7,200 inhabitants. Shortly afterwards, in the Constitutiones Aegidianae of 1357, Cagli appeared among the nine major cities in the Marca (along with Pesaro, Fano and Fossombrone). The economic development of the city centred mainly on the manufacture of woollen cloth (later also silk) and the tanning of hides, industries that grew considerably under the dukes of Urbino.