Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

2. Vincenzo Gemito, Giovane pastore degli Abruzzi, Museo di
Capodimonte, Naples.
1. Vincenzo Gemito, Pescatore, Museo del Bargello, Florence.
the foundling Gemito. With lyrical naturalism, these
heads anticipate the portraits of some twentiethcentury
Italian sculptors such as Libero Andreotti and
Giacomo Manzù.
The portrait of a child, from that time onwards, became
a constant theme in Gemito’s sculpture, in many
different versions: fisherboy, water vendor, harpoonist,
potter, gipsy girl, and archer, all subjects that sprang
from the same idea, that of realistically depicting these
urban children, the scugnizzi, who, by growing up in
the streets, had acquired a poetic understanding of life.
Indeed in those years, the theme of the young boy
dominated Neapolitan and Italian artistic culture:
boys were described in a masterly way by Matilde
Serao within their social ambience, in order to create
a picture of a grim, miserable life that however was
imbued with great poetic qualities. These portraits
by Gemito also correspond to the paintings made
by Mancini during the same years, such as the
Carminella in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome,
the Prevetariello (the little seminarian), in the Museo
di Capodimonte and Una povera bimba (a poor little
girl) in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 3 .
Gemito’s real epiphany in sculpture took place
in 1875, when he made the bronze figure of the
Pescatore (fisherboy) (fig.1), which turned out to be
not only his masterpiece, but also one of the most
beautiful sculptures of the entire century, raising him
to the level of the great, celebrated Auguste Rodin
and of his statue of a nude man, L’Âge d’airain (the
age of bronze), which was exhibited in 1878 at the
Salon of Paris. In comparison with Rodin’s nude,
Gemito’s Pescatore, which the sculptor brought
directly to Paris and exhibited in 1877 at the Salon,
where it was awarded an honourable mention, is an
anti-rhetorical celebration of the pure, genuine beauty
of adolescence. It wreaks havoc with both academic
naturalism and literary romantic sentimentalism,
shattering the aesthetic vocabulary of a classicism
of graceful, lifeless forms, and, with its pureness,
heralding modernity.
Another work that confirmed the powerfully innovative
force of Gemito’s sculpture was a terracotta he made
in 1876, Il Cinese (the Chinese Boy), formerly in the
Minozzi Collection: a young acrobat is lying on the
floor, captured in a moment in which he is raising his
hips and legs in the movement of an exercise. It is a
unique, fascinating work, formally just as innovative
as Edgar Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (also
called Grande danseuse habillée), which was made a
few years later 4 .
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