VINCENZO GEMITO. — Sculptor, b. Naples 16 July 1852, d. there 10 March 1929, ranks among the greatest Italian artists of the modern age. Trained first, while still a boy, by Emanuele Gagiano and later by Stanislao Lista, he sought and found his models among the ancient bronzes from Herculaneum and Pompeii displayed in the National Museum of Naples.
Endowed with an exceptional temperament, a keen intelligence, and an instinctive taste often exquisite but very little cultivated, G. frequently succeeded in transcending academic conventions to give free expression to a plastic realism filtered through his experience of Hellenistic sculpture and pursued through the calculated effects of a purely Campanian pictorialism.
The portrait of Giuseppe Verdi (1872), that of Mariano Fortuny (1880), *Il piccolo pescatore* (1876), *Il pescatore* (1878), and *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 recluse in a room, modelling in clay and drawing. Some beautiful drawings survive from that period, and in the master’s art, once he resumed his work, the mark of a more refined technique.
At that point, the extreme refinement and preciosity of his craftsmanship led him, almost instinctively—especially in his later years—to model only sculptures in gold and silver; thus the numerous variants of the tondo with the profile of Alexander and some reworkings of his finest early works.
Cf. A. De Rinaldis, s.V. ENOCH. Ital., XVI, pp. 495-496, with bibl.: A. Schietini, G. Milano 1944. Emilio Lavagnino