GEMITO, VINCENZO. — Sculptor, born in Naples on 16 July 1852, died there on 1 March 1929; he ranks among the major Italian artists of the modern age. Initially trained, when he was still scarcely more than a boy, by Emanuele Gagliano and then by Stanislao Lista, he sought out and recognized his own models among the ancient bronzes from Ercolano and Pompei displayed in the National Museum of Naples.
Endowed with an exceptional temperament, a highly receptive intelligence, and an often exquisite instinctive taste, but also extremely lacking in education, G. very often succeeded in overcoming academic conventionalisms in order to give free expression to a plastic realism, filtered through his experience of Hellenistic sculpture and pursued through the calculated effects of a pictorialism of genuinely Campanian taste.
The portrait of Giuseppe Verdi (1872), that of Mariano Fortuny (1880), the Piccolo pescatore (1876), the Pescatore (1878), and the Venditore d'acqua (1881) are the masterpieces of his youth. After the great success achieved by his sculptures, his mind gradually began to falter, until from 1887 to 1909, for more than twenty years, he remained shut up like a savage in a small room, modelling in clay and drawing. A number of beautiful drawings remain from that period, as does, in the master's art, when he resumed his work, the mark of a more refined technique.
At that point, the extreme and exquisite dexterity of his craft, which had become increasingly precious, led him, almost instinctively, especially in his final years, to model sculptures only in gold and silver; such are the numerous variants of the tondo with the profile of Alessandro and several reworkings of his finest youthful works.