Elena Vittori

From law to the easel

Elena Vittori grew up in her father Luciano’s studio, among the smell of oil paint and the quiet discipline of a working painter. She trained first as a lawyer and practised for years — but the studio never let her go. In time she set down the law and took up the brush full-time, and found in it the vocation that had been waiting for her all along.

The soul in the eyes

She paints animals — dogs above all, but also cats and birds — with an almost unsettling tenderness. Her gift is for the face: the tilt of a head, the weight of a gaze, the particular personality that makes one creature unlike any other. Each brushstroke draws out that character, so that her animals seem to look back at you and hold you there.

A Maremma at her side

Her companion and muse is a Tuscan Maremma Sheepdog — a great white guardian of the Apuan Alps, as much a part of the landscape as the stone and the light. Something of that regional soul runs through all her work.

Marble in the blood

Born in 1972 in the Apuan Alps — the very mountains that yield the white marble of Carrara — Elena is a sculptor as well as a painter. That feeling for volume, for weight, for stone worked by the hand runs quietly through her painted animals, and finds its echo in the weathered, almost carved surface of every Heritage Fresco she makes.

Arte di Montagna

Elena is also the founder of Arte di Montagna, a cultural collective that brings together artists from the mountains of the Apuan Alps. Her legal training turned, unexpectedly, to the work of curating and of holding a community of makers together.

The fresco skin

Within Heritage Fresco she carries the animal series, working each portrait until it wears the skin of an ancient fresco — cracked, weathered, timeless. Every work is printed on Hahnemühle fine-art paper on aluminium Dibond, in a limited edition, numbered and certified through MyArtRegistry.com.