Hermes Announcing to Calypso Zeus’s Command to Help Ulysses Return Home

Considered today, to be one of the Midwest’s foremost self-taught artists, Aldobrando Piacenza immigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager. Later in life, he turned to making art, remembering his homeland through images of countryside vistas, Catholic iconography, and the myths of classical Rome. His idiosyncratic and engaging style is the result of striving to work within the conventions of academic art without the benefit of art school training. His work was greatly appreciated by the Chicago Imagist artist Roger Brown, who helped to organize a solo exhibition of his work at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1971.