Italiano 
English Many reasons contributed to that surprising judgment. Almost unknown, the twenty-three-year-old Sardinian sculptor seemed to confirm the myth of the artist of genius: coming from a region without art schools, armed only with his genuine talent and an intuitive conception of form.
Due to his precocious talent, Francesco Ciusa (Nuoro, 1883-Cagliari, 1949) had obtained a grant from the Municipality of Nuoro to study at the Academy of Florence under the guidance of the sculptor Domenico Trentacoste. Returning to Sardinia in 1905, Ciusa began modeling the plaster of La madre dell'ucciso the following year with the intention of presenting it in Venice. And it was precisely Trentacoste, who sat on the acceptance committee of the 1907 Biennale, who facilitated the participation of his student.
The figure of the old woman appeared compact and enclosed in an impenetrable block. Sitting on the ground like a sort of shriveled fruit, with her knees drawn to her chest, wide-open eyes, bare feet, her wrinkled mouth closed in an unappealable silence, the elderly woman conveyed a sense of silent pain and a necessary omertà.
What made Ciusa's breakthrough effective was above all a stylistic evaluation. The merciless realism of the physiognomic details, the brutal if not feral pose, the theme of dignified and composed suffering.
In the evaluation of the young Sardinian sculptor's work, other arguments thus came into play, no longer only of a stylistic or formal nature. The work told, in its own way, a story, and it was a true story, embedded in the living and pulsating reality of a remote and archaic region.
In the contrast between the collected and static pose and the realistic rendering of the details the image referred to the Nuoro ritual of sa ria (the funeral wake).
After the successful showing at the Biennale, the plaster of La madre dell'ucciso was cast in bronze and destined for the National Gallery of Modern Art.
