The Kathredal - Mother Symbolically Represented | Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Kathredal — Mother Symbolically Represented

Achilles G. Rizzoli, The Kathredal - Mother Symbolically Represented, 1935, ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan, Bonnie and Sy Grossman, Berkeley, CA, and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2015.4, © The Ames Gallery, Berkeley, CA

Achilles G. Rizzoli lived his entire life in San Francisco, working as a draftsman in an architectural office for more than forty years. He was devoted to his own art, particularly an extensive series of architectural renderings of a utopian city in which he portrayed people, most significantly his mother, as buildings. The Kathredal: Mother Symbolically Represented is an architectural personification of his mother’s essential attributes: strength, beauty, and spiritual perfection. The YTTE (Yield to Total Elation) plans are also symbolic representations of people but adopt a floor plan format. The YTTE drawings often explore ideas of his father, who disappeared when Rizzoli was nineteen.

Title

The Kathredal — Mother Symbolically Represented

Artist

Achilles G. Rizzoli

Date

1935

Location

Not on view

Dimensions

sheet and image: 33 ³⁄₄ × 22 in. (85.7 × 55.9 cm)

Copyright

Credit Line

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan, Bonnie and Sy Grossman, Berkeley, CA, and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

Mediums