VELA, VINCENZO

VELA, VINCENZO. - Sculptor, b. at Ligornetto near Mendrisio in Canton Ticino on May 3, 1822, d. there on Oct. 4, 1891.

The first sculpture that brought fame to V. in Milan, where as a boy he had worked as a stonemason in the Duomo,

but where he had also attended the courses at Brera as a pupil of Cacciatori, was his Spartaco (1847; Palazzo Litta). This success stemmed also from the illustrative values of a theme of clear significance in those revolutionary years. The Austrian government suspected him, so much that V., a volunteer in Switzerland against the separatist movement in 1852, after that warlike adventure preferred to go to Turin rather than return to Milan. And he remained there until 1867, succeeding Gaggini as teacher of modeling at the Accademia Albertina.

Those Turin years were the most prolific fifteen for the sculptor who, setting out on a path in many ways similar to that of Bartolini, did not entirely eschew academic forms even when he wished to express naturalistic conceptions. So much so that the greatest interest of his sculptures almost always seems to be found in their prevailing illustrative concerns. Thus in the Desolazione which is in Lugano (c. 1852), thus in the characteristic group of the daughters of Marquis Ala Ponzone (formerly in Cremona), thus in the images of Queens Maria Teresa and Maria Adelaide (1861) in the church of the Consolata in Turin, thus in the tomb of Antonio Rosmini which is in the church of the Crocifisso in Stresa, and finally in what is considered his masterpiece: the Napoleone morente in the Castle of Versailles (1866).

After '67 V. retired again to Ligornetto, where he continued to work intensely until his death, evolving his style in a direction increasingly inclined toward pictorialism, toward which so many of his pupils and followers in Piedmont and Lombardy had already turned. But the bronze high relief Le vittime del lavoro (1883) in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, which is a characteristic example of that evolution, despite its feeling and fine breadth of composition, cannot be considered among the master's most successful works. Some of his portraits are excellent, among which Tito Pollestrini in the Civic Museum of Turin and Cavour in the Palazzo della Borsa in Genoa are most noteworthy.