Giuseppe Ducrot
Giuseppe Ducrot
Luigi Rovati
2022
Carrara marble
The sculpture by Giuseppe Ducrot, carved in white Carrara marble, is dedicated to Professor Luigi Rovati (1928–2019), Cavaliere del Lavoro and Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic — who in 1961 founded Rotta Research Laboratorium, a pioneering biotech company and an international centre of excellence in the research and development of new medicines, which he led to become one of Italy’s leading pharmaceutical multinationals.
His deep sensitivity to history, archaeology, and research continues to inspire the Foundation that bears his name, developing his ideas through a continuum between art and science.
The statue, grandeur nature, is placed at the viewer’s eye level: rather than being looked up to, it meets the observer face to face, in a kind of silent dialogue.
The work exists in perfect harmony with its surroundings — an elegant neoclassical building — where the presence of the physician, researcher, entrepreneur, and humanist evokes not a glorious past but rather a living present that endures, as if to say that his work has never ceased.
The body, though imposing, bears no excessively marked features: its strength lies in the composed, resolute posture that directs the viewer’s attention toward the face — the true centre of inner expression and personality. As the sculptor himself observes: “Statuary is an art that is both looked at and not looked at.”