GEMITO, VINCENZO. - Sculptor, b. in Naples on 16 July 1852, d. there on 1 March 1929, is to be ranked among the greatest Italian artists of the modern age. Educated first, when he was still barely a boy, by Emanuele Gagliano and then by Stanislao Lista, he sought out and recognized his own models among the ancient bronzes from Herculaneum and Pompeii exhibited in the National Museum of Naples.
Endowed with an exceptional temperament, a quick intelligence, and an instinctive taste that was often exquisite, but also very poorly educated, G. very often succeeded in overcoming the conventionalisms of the academy 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 picturesqueness of frankly Campanian taste.
The portrait of Giuseppe Verdi (1872), that of Mariano Fortuny (1880), the Piccolo pescatore (1876), the Pescatore (1878), the Venditore d'acqua (1881) are the masterpieces of his youth. After the great success obtained by his sculptures, his mind gradually began to waver, until from 1887 to 1909, for more than twenty years, he remained shut away like a savage in a little room, modelling in clay and drawing. From that period there remain some very beautiful drawings and, in the master's art, when he resumed his work, the mark of a more refined technique.
Then the extreme, exquisite dexterity of his craft, which had become ever more precious, led him, almost instinctively, especially in his last years, to model only sculptures in gold and silver; thus the numerous variants of the tondo with the profile of Alexander and certain reworkings of his best youthful works.
Bibliography
Emilio Lavagnino