The masterful Piccirilli brothers set up shop in the Bronx and used hammers and chisels to create some of the city's most significant public sculptures.
…
Few people have shaped the New York landscape as prominently as the stone-carving Piccirilli brothers, six Italian immigrants who churned out one major public sculpture after another in their Bronx studio complex beginning in the 1890s.
From the Alexander Hamilton US Customs House in Bowling Green to the Bronx Zoo, from the figures of George Washington on the Washington Arch in Greenwich Village to the reclining lions on the flagship building of the New York Public Library, the Piccirillis have left their mark everywhere city.
"You think about the number of works that the Piccirilli brothers carved, they're everywhere," said Thayer Tolles, curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It's not just the firemen's memorial and the Frick, it's the New York Stock Exchange, it's the Brooklyn Museum. It's everywhere you know and don't know."
The brothers — Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Getulio, Masaniello and Orazio — deftly juggled dual professional identities. While their main job was to execute the visions of famous sculptors such as Daniel Chester French, for whose design for the Abraham Lincoln figure the Piccirillis carved from 28 blocks of 150-ton Georgia marble for the Lincoln Memorial, also sculpted their own original works.
Attilio and Furio were educated academically in Rome, and Mr. French held the two men in such high esteem as artists that he acquired original works by both for the Met while serving as head of the museum's board of trustees' sculpture committee in the early 20th century.
"If you just put aside the stone aspect of their careers, they've each achieved incredible things in their own right as independent sculptors," Ms Tolles said of Attilio and Furio.
Yet the Piccirillis have been largely forgotten, lost in the shadow cast by famous American sculptors such as Mr. French himself.
Now Eduardo Montes-Bradley, a 63-year-old filmmaker who grew up in Buenos Aires, wants to elevate the brothers' legacy by shedding new light on their work in a documentary he's been working on for two years. The movie, "The Italian Factor", he portrays these carvers not as stereotypical unskilled migrant workers in "funny paper hats," as he puts it, but rather as highly talented artisans essential to public art in the city and America at large.
"When we talk about the Piccirillis, we have to take our hats off," Mr Montes-Bradley said. "They were at the top of their trade and their father traced his origins in sculpture back to the Renaissance when Michelangelo found the stone for the 'David' in Carrara," the marble center near the town of Massa where the Piccirilli brothers grew up.
Traditional sculptors working in America during the 19th and most of the 20th century usually modeled their sculptures in clay and then cast them in plaster. They then relied on experienced carvers, often Italian, to translate their visions into stone using the plaster casts as guides. These stone craftsmen not only had the ability to reproduce the sculptor's images with hammer and chisel, but were trained in the use of a critical device, called a pointing machine, to complete the complex task of rendering a sculptor's design into a larger, some times monumental, scale.
For the Lincoln Memorial, for example, Mr. French sent a 7-foot plaster model of the president to the Piccirillis studio in the Bronx, where the brothers carved the colossal 19-foot statue that now towers over the National Mall in Washington, DC .
On a recent morning, the evolution of stone carving technology was on vivid display at the U.S. Customs House, a short walk from where Attilio and Ferruccio Piccirilli arrived in America at the Battery in 1888. They stand before four monumental allegorical figures representing the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, Mr. Montes-Bradley, who was in town from his home in Virginia to film the Piccirilli sculpture video, explained how the brothers used a pointing machine to carve the Four Continents from Mr. French's models.
The machine was a precision measuring device, using a system of adjustable metal arms and pointers that could be placed at any point on a sculpted model, such as the crown of the head, and used to locate the corresponding point on the surface of the marble replica.
As Mr Montes-Bradley explained that the pointing machine had been replaced by laser technology, he spotted two workers with a device mounted on a tripod. He connected with the person in charge, Aaron Gonzalez, and asked him questions.
We are "laser scanning" the facades of the Customs House and its sculptures, Mr. Gonzalez said, to create "virtual models" of the building that could be used for future repair and conversion work. “This machine captures millions of points a second,” he said, gesturing to his Faro laser scanner. "It's incredible technology."
Mr. Montes-Bradley smiled. “The laser can do it easier and faster,” he said, “but never better. Because the soul of the artist is missing."
That's where the Piccirilli brothers come in.
In the decades before the brothers and their father, Giuseppe, arrived in New York and opened their first studio in a converted horse stable on West 39th Street in Manhattan, sculptors working in America usually sent their plaster models to Italy to be translated. in marble from sculptures there. The process could take a year.
But there came "a moment of revelation," Mr. Montes-Bradley said, when Mr. French discovered Piccirillis' Manhattan studio. "When he walked into that room, he must have said, 'Oh my God, this looks like the wonderful studios of Florence.' It opened my eyes and that's when I like to think the American Renaissance took off."
Over the next 35 years, Mr. French hired the Piccirillis to carve all but two of his stone sculptures, and the Piccirilli studio helped establish New York as a major center of art production, according to an essay by Mary Shelley and Bill Carroll in the Journal of the Bronx County Historical Society. The family studio was run by Giuseppe, the patriarch, until his death in 1910, when Attilio took over.
"I think French would be the first to say the Piccirillis were better stonemasons than he was," said Daniel Preston, co-editor of Mr. French's papers. He added that Mr. French even tried and failed twice to persuade the Lincoln Memorial officials to add Piccirilli's name to the monument.
(On October 25, the Landmark West! preservation team will host a Zoom talk for the Piccirillis by sculptor John Belardo.)
The brothers' compound on East 142nd Street, in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, included a pair of brick studio buildings, one decorated with medallions and bas-reliefs, flanking an earlier combination of studios and hooded houses.
Being inside "this bustling hive," wrote WM Berger in Scribner's Magazine in 1919, it was easy "to feel that this place resembles, with its mountains of marble and granite, its antique busts and plaster reproductions of Greek and of Roman art, more ancient 'bottega' where the old Italian Renaissance masters carved their masterpieces, than anything our modern city can offer."
Original works sculpted by the Piccirillis include "Indian Law" and "Indian Literature," two allegorical figures on the Brooklyn Museum's cornice, and the exterior tires in the Frick collection — as well as some interior architectural decorations at the Frick, reportedly recently discovered by Mr. Montes-Bradley in documents taken from the archives of the collection.
In 1901, Attilio found new prominence by winning the competition to create the sculptures for the Maine Monument at Columbus Circle.
"This is an immigrant success story, but it still makes 'The Outcast' because it doesn't feel fully part of it," Mr. Montes-Bradley said, referring to a moving sculpture that was once on display at St. Mark's Church in -the- Bowery. 'The Outcast', sculpted by Attilio in marble, depicted a seated, besieged man naked with his knees drawn to his chest, one hand grasping his shoulder and the other shielding his head as if from a blow. Mr. Montes-Bradley, whose grandfather was a native Italian, believes the play reflects its creator's deep alienation at a time of rampant anti-Italian sentiment in the United States.
"That man was in pain," she said of Attilius. "What he's externalizing there is that money and success aren't everything: "Even though I'm successful, I don't feel good. I feel like I don't belong here."
When given artistic freedom, Attilio created sculptures inspired by The Firemen's academic figurative style Memorial at 100th Street and Riverside Drive (which bears his signature) to a more modernist approach. "The Joy of Life," installed above the entrance to 1 Rockefeller Plaza in 1937, is a colorful relief that looks closer to some of Pablo Picasso's works than Mr. French's.
Among Piccirilli's three original works on display at the Met is "Fragilina" (1923), an ethereal, idealized female nude in sculpted marble by Attilio with weakened hands and simplified facial features and hair. Ms. Tolles, the museum's curator, said the work showed the artist moving toward smoother surfaces and larger stylized form, suggesting he was "less bound to the American sculptural tradition and perhaps more willing to experiment."
Mr Montes-Bradley, who made a pilgrimage to admire 'Fragilina' some time ago, had a more visceral response.
"It shows more than it reveals, and it reveals more than it shows," he said of the statue.
Attilio Piccirilli died at his 142nd Street studio in 1945 and was buried with his family at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Today the only ornament marking the many graves in the main family plot is a bronze sculpture of Attilio. Called "Mater Amorosa," it is a copy of two figures from the Maine monument, of a mother comforting a grieving child.
The Piccirillis' mother was so important to them that after her death in Italy in 1921, they brought her body to New York. It is perhaps at the time of her burial in the Bronx that Attilio, the creator of the shocking sculpture "The Outcast", first felt at home in America.
"When you bury someone you loved in the soil of a country," he said in a 1940 radio broadcast on American identity, "it's like realizing you belong to that soil forever."
*Cover photo: Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
Source: nytimes