Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Vincenzo Gemito
Naples 1852 - 1929
Head of a Young Fisherman
41
Bronze.
Height: 41.7 cm With base: 45.8 cm
Provenance: Private collection, USA
Vincenzo Gemito, an important figure in the history
of Italian sculpture, marked the transition from
nineteenth-century naturalism and impressionism
to a modern mode of expression. Born in Naples in
1852 he was abandoned at the ‘foundling wheel’
immediately after his birth and received during the
night by a nun, as the writer Salvatore Di Giacomo
related (1928) 1 . Together with Medardo Rosso (1858-
1928), who was six years younger, Gemito was one of
the greatest and most original innovators in sculpture of
the 19 th century, which by then was mired in academic
clichés: he asserted the pre-eminence of emotion over
academic rules.
The painter Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) was the same
age and a close friend of his: they both frequented the
studio of the sculptor Stanislao Lista when they were
boys, from 1864 to 1868. At that time Lista, together
with Filippo Palizzi and Michele Cammarano, was at
the cutting edge of the Neapolitan schools of Verismo
and Plasticismo (Domenico Morelli, twenty-nine years
older than Gemito and Mancini, later became its main
exponent). The story goes that the two boys were in
the habit of running together all over Lista’s studio,
shouting and joking, and that Gemito was ‘rowdy and
domineering 2 .
The world of Neapolitan Verismo, was the cultural
atmosphere in which Gemito began his career and this
movement depended upon close connections between
painting, sculpture and literature. Undoubtedly, the
subjects and themes chosen by literature to give a
realistic picture of Naples described a hard, meagre
life, with its everyday habits and humble characters
and stories. These same people were depicted by
painters and sculptors and this was the ambience
in which the art of Mancini, Gemito and Migliara
developed. Gemito’s whole work essentially moved
between two poles: the immediate expression of truth
or veracity, on the one hand, and on the other the
quest for a classicism that was not academic.
In 1868, Gemito made two terracotta and bronze
heads of boys. One was Scugnizzo (Neapolitan street
urchin), in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, a boy
with a hat, his mouth open as if he were shouting, and
perforated pupils that give him a lively expression. The
other was Testa di ragazzo (head of a boy), which was
donated by the painter Giuseppe De Nittis to the Real
Casa dell’Annunziata, the institution that had taken in
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