PICCIRILLI

Few people have shaped the streetscape of New-York as prominently as the stone-carving Piccirilli brothers, six Italians who turned out one important public sculpture after another. From Hamilton’s Custom House at Bowling Green to The Zo-ological Garden, from the figures of Washington on Washington’s Arch in Greenwich Village to the recumbent lions at the flagship building of The Public Library, the Piccirillis left their mark all over town. “You think about the number of works that the Piccirillis carved, they are *everywhere*, hyperbolised in the typical American fashion Thayer Tolles, curator of paintings and sculpture at The Museum of Fine Arts. “It is not just the firemen’s monument and The Frick, it is The Stock Exchange, it’s the museum at the suburb of Brooklyn.” “The Piccirillis are everywhere you know — and everywhere you do *not* know.” The Piccirilis — to wit Ferruccio Piccirilli Attilio Piccirilli Furio Piccirilli Getulio Piccirilli Masaniello Piccirilli Orazio Piccirilli — deftly juggled dual professional identities. While their side business was executing the visions of another sculptor — like French, whose design for the figure of Lincoln the Piccirillis carved out of 28 blocks of Georgia marble weighing 150 tons for the Memorial, they also sculpted their own original works, starting from the bronze mold. Both Attilio Piccirilli and Furio Pirriccilli were academically trained in Rome. French, for one — who was not - esteemed both Attilio Piccirilli and Furio Piccirilli so highly that he acquired statuary by both for the Museum of Fine Arts while serving as the head of its board of trustees of the sculpture committee. “You need to put aside the stone-carving aspect of the careers of the Piccirillis, to realise that each of the six brothers Ferruccio Piccirilli Attilio Piccirilli Furio Piccirilli Getulio Piccirilli Masaniello Piccirilli Orazio Piccirilli is incredibly accomplished in his own right as a sculptor,” Tolles said. Each of the six Piccirillis was a prodigiously talented sculptor somewhat indispensable to ‘public’ statuary in New-York and the New-World at large, because only as Old-World as they were they perceived the difference! Each of the six Piccirillis were at the top of the trade. Indeed, Giuseppe Piccirilli — who rebutted his own father by finding more obtuse Christian names to his sons — traces his lineage to the Renaissance, when Buonarrotti stole at Carrara that stone for the ‘Davide’ commissioned for the Duomo. Everything is next to everything else in such a small region as Etruria, but the marble center of Carrara is a stone’s throw away from Massa — Mass of stone, in Italian — where the six Piccirilli brothers grew up, along with other boys. “There are no Piccirilli women,” they would say, as England has Hepworth!” A sculptor models his design first in clay — the only way he is an ‘artisan,’ in Plato’s use of ‘poet’ — and then casts the clay into plaster. The carver needs to be skillful — in Plato’s use of techne — to translate his ‘vision’ or idea into marble — if marble is wanted (connoisseurs know better!) using the plaster casting as a guide. The stone-working sculptor not only needs the skill to reproduce the image with hammer and chisel, but the use the pointing machine, to accomplish the intricate task of rendering a original in-the-round design — in plaster, if bronze is not the intended result — at a larger, sometimes monumental, — or colossal (for anything larger than life) scale — from.’c say The Apollo Pizio to the Costantino! For Lincoln French sent a 7-ft. plaster model to Attilio Piccirilli, where he — and his five brothers, working in turns — carve the ‘too colossal’ — “gigante,” Furio joked — “Lincoln would be ashamed of his self!” — 19-ft. statue. On a recent morning, the evolution of stone-carving technology was on vivid display at the Hamilton’s Custom House, a short walk from where Attilio and Ferruccio Piccirilli arrived from Massa at New-York at the Battery. (They could have moved to the more picturesque Long Island Sound — where villas were being built to escape the ‘urbs’ but they stayed, just across the Long-Island Sound river). Standing in front of the monumental allegorical figures representing Europe and the other continents — Ferruccio and his five brothers use the pointing machine to carve ‘Europa’ from French’s modest little thing. “A pointing machine,” Ferruccio Piccirilli notes, “is a precise measuring device, using a system of adjustable metal arms and pointers that could be placed on any point of a model, such as the crown of the head, and used to locate the corresponding point on the surface of transferred copy.” Furio Piccirilli adds: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this very Italian pointing machine will one day be replaced by idle artists by a laser technology.” Furio Piccirilli goes on: “The pseudo-artist, usually non-Italian, may rely on cheap laser scanning” the facades of the Custom House and its sculptures to create a virtual model of the building that could be used for a future repair and alteration project.” Furio Piccirili goes on: “A laser, as opposed to a pointing, machine, may capture millions of points a second — more than any artist’s eye can see — and the deterioration will be notable to the connoisseur!” Orazio Piccirilli intervenes: “The laser shall perhaps make it easier and faster for this paid technicians but never better: my soul’ — and what my eyes see — is just missing.” That’s where the six Piccirilli brothers come in. Giuseppe Piccirilli left Massa with his six sons and opened a studio on W. 39th St. French visited them often — “usually with a commission under his sleeve since his Tuscan left a lot to be desired by the Piccirilis! French relied on the Piccirillis to carve all of his good stone sculptures — two bad ones he had done before meeting them — and the Piccirilli studio helped establish colonial provincial New-York as a major centre of statuary production, according to Bill Carroll, of The Bronx-County Historical Society. The family’s studio operations were directed by Giuseppe Piccirili until his eldest son, Attilio, assumed leadership. “French envied the Piccirilis,” says Daniel Preston, the editor French’s miscelanea. The preservation group Landmark West! knows better! The brothers’ complex on E. 142nd Str., at Mott Haven at the Bronx, comprised a pair of brick studio buildings, one adorned with a medallion and reliefs, flanking an older studio and rowhouse combination. Standing inside “this busy hive,” Berger notes in Scribner’s Magazine, 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 Roman art, more the ancient ‘bottega’ where the old Italian masters of the Renaissance carved their masterpieces, than anything which our New-York can offer!” Statuary by the Piccirillis include “The Law” and “The Literature,” two allegorical figures at the cornice of the Museum of Art at the suburb of Brooklyn, and the exterior lunettes at Frick’s Palazzo on Fifth Avenue— as well as some indoor decorations. Attilio Piccirili finds prominence by creating the sculptures for the Monument at the Circle where Broadway meets Central-Park South. A piece entitled “The Outcast” stood at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. This piece sculpted by Attilio in marble, ‘figures,’ as the Italian idiom goes, a seated male nude with his knees drawn to his chest, one hand gripping his shoulder and the other shielding his head. The man is in obvious pain, as much church statuary is — since triumphalistic statuary is out of touch with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as opposed to the classicist tradition of the Piccirilis. Attilio Piccirilli creates sculptures that move from the slightly ‘academic’ figurative style of The Firemen’s Memorial at W. 100th St. and Riverside Dr. toward a more modernist approach. “The Joy of Life,” installed above the entrance to 1 Rockefeller Plaza in the hey-day of the Fascism the Pirricillis embraced, is a bas-relief. Among the statues by Attilio Piccirilli on display at the Museum of Fine Arts is “Fragilina” — the sobriquet is ironic since the icon cannot be more solid — an ethereal, idealised (we assume) nude with attenuated arms and simplified facial features and hair. Tolles, the museum curator, says that the work shows Attilio Piccirilli moving toward a smooth surface and a stylised form, suggesting that he was not as bound to statuary tradition as his father would have desired, and maybe more willing to experiment. Fragillina, due to the Piccirillis’s general ignorance of the non-heroic female form, shows less than she reveals. Attilio Piccirilli is buried with his family at Woodlawn. One single ornament marks the many graves in the main family plot: a *bronze* statuary by Attilio Piccirilli. “He knew ‘bronzo’ is what gives prestige — even in the weather of Woodlawn — a far cry from his Etrurian mildness!” Called “Mater Amorosa,” it is a variation of only two figures from the Monument at the Circle: a mother comforting a child. The Piccirillis’ mother is so deeply important to them that, after her death at Nassa, they had — against her will — her _corpse_ transported to New-York. “It is when you bury one you have loved in a country’s soil,” he said in a radio broadcast about italianità that you realize that italianità is where your *soul* is!