Few people have had as much of an impact on New York’s streetscape as the Piccirilli brothers, six Italian immigrants who created one important public sculpture after another in their Bronx studio complex starting in the 1890s.
From the Alexander Hamilton US Custom 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 in the flagship building of the New York Public Library, the Piccirillis have left their mark everywhere in the city.
“If you think about the number of works the Piccirilli brothers have carved, they’re everywhere,” said Thayer Tolles, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s not just the fireman’s monument and the Frick, it’s the New York Stock Exchange, it’s the Brooklyn Museum. They are everywhere you know and what you don’t know.”
The brothers – Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Getulio, Masaniello and Orazio – deftly juggled their dual professional identities. While their main business was to realize the visions of famous sculptors such as Daniel Chester French, whose design for the figure of Abraham Lincoln, the Piccirillis, was carved from 28 blocks of Georgia marble weighing 150 tons for the Lincoln Memorial, they also created their own original works.
Attilio and Furio received their academic training in Rome, and Mr. French held both men in such high esteem as artists that he acquired original works from both for the Met while serving as chairman of the sculpture committee of the museum’s board of trustees in the early 20th century.
“Putting aside the stonemason aspect of their careers, each of them is an incredibly successful independent sculptor in his own way,” Ms. Tolles said of Attilio and Furio.
Yet the Piccirillis have largely been forgotten, overshadowed 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 honor the brothers’ legacy and shine a new spotlight on their work in a documentary he has been working on for two years. The film “The Italian Factor” portrays these carvers not as stereotypical unskilled immigrant workers in “funny paper hats,” as it puts it, but as extraordinarily talented artisans who are essential to public art in the city and across America.
“When we talk about the Piccirillis, we have to take our hats off,” Mr. Montes-Bradley said. “They were at the top of their field and their father traced his lineage in sculpture to the Renaissance, when Michelangelo found the stone for ‘David’ at Carrara,” the marble center near the town of Massa where the Piccirilli brothers grew up.
Traditional sculptors working in America during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries typically modeled their sculptures in clay and then cast them in plaster. Next, they relied on skilled carvers, often Italians, to translate their visions into stone, using the plaster casts as guides. Not only did these stone-working craftsmen have the ability to reproduce the sculptor’s images with a hammer and chisel, they were also trained in the use of a crucial device called a pointing machine to accomplish the complicated task of translating a sculptor’s design into a larger one to represent larger scale. sometimes monumental, scale.
For the Lincoln Memorial, for example, Mr. French sent a 7-foot-tall plaster model of the president to Piccirillis’s Bronx studio, where the brothers carved the colossal 19-foot-tall statue that now towers over the National Mall in Washington, D.C
On a recent morning, the evolution of stonemasonry technology was vividly on display at the U.S. Customs House, just a short walk away where Attilio and Ferruccio Piccirilli arrived in America at the Battery in 1888. Standing in front of four monumental allegorical figures representing America, Europe, Asia and Africa, Mr. Montes-Bradley explained how the brothers went to town from his home in Virginia to watch a video of Piccirilli -Sculpture turning machine for carving the four continents based on models by Mr. French.
The machine was a precise measuring device that used 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 were used to locate the corresponding point on the marble surface Copy.
Just as Mr. Montes-Bradley was explaining that the pointing machine had now been replaced by laser technology, he spotted two workers with a device mounted on a tripod. He jumped on the man in charge, Aaron Gonzales, and peppered him with questions.
“We are scanning the facades of the Custom House and its sculptures with a laser,” Mr. Gonzales said, to create “virtual models” of the building that could be used in a future repair and remodeling project. “This machine captures millions of points per second,” he said, pointing to his Faro laser scanner. “It’s an incredible technology.”
Mr Montes-Bradley grinned. “The laser can make it easier and faster,” he said, “but never better.” Because the soul of the artist is missing.”
This is where the Piccirilli brothers come into play.
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 typically shipped their plaster models to Italy to be translated into marble by carvers there. The process could take a year.
But there came “a moment of revelation,” Mr. Montes-Bradley said, when Mr. French discovered the Piccirillis’ Manhattan studio. “When he walked into that room he must have said, ‘My God, this looks like the great studios of Florence.’ It was eye-opening and I like to think that’s when the American Renaissance began.”
Over the next 35 years, Mr. French commissioned 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 business was run by Giuseppe, the patriarch, until his death in 1910, when Attilio took over.
“I think French would be the first to say that the Piccirillis were better stone sculptors than he was,” said Daniel Preston, co-editor of Mr. French’s newspapers. He added that Mr. French even tried twice to persuade officials in charge of the Lincoln Memorial to add the Piccirilli name to the monument, but failed.
(On October 25, the conservation group Landmark West! will host a Zoom talk about the Piccirillis by sculptor John Belardo.)
The brothers’ complex on East 142nd Street in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx consisted of two brick studio buildings, one decorated with a medallion and reliefs, flanking an older studio/rowhouse combination.
Standing in “this busy hive,” W. M. Berger wrote in Scribner’s Magazine in 1919, “it was easy to sense that this place, with its mountains of marble and granite, its ancient busts and plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman art, was more like that.” “The ancient ‘Bottega’, where the old Italian Renaissance masters created their masterpieces, is larger than anything our modern city has to offer.”
Original works created by the Piccirillis include “Indian Law” and “Indian Literature,” two allegorical figures on the cornice of the Brooklyn Museum and the exterior lunettes in the Frick Collection—as well as some interior architectural decorations in the Frick, according to information Mr. Montes-Bradley recently found in documents discovered from the collection’s archives.
In 1901, Attilio gained new fame when he won the competition to create the sculptures for the Maine Monument at Columbus Circle.
“This is an immigrant success story, but he still does ‘The Outcast’ because he doesn’t feel fully part of the whole,” Mr. Montes-Bradley said, referring to a moving sculpture once in the St. St. Mark’s Church was -the-Bowery. “The Outcast,” sculpted in marble by Attilio, depicts a seated, beleaguered male nude, his knees drawn to his chest, one hand grasping his shoulder and the other protecting his head as if blocking a blow. Mr. Montes-Bradley, whose paternal grandfather was a native of Italy, believes the work reflects its creator’s deep alienation at a time of rampant anti-Italian sentiment in the United States.
“This man was in pain,” he said of Attilio. “What he’s expressing 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.'”
When given artistic freedom, Attilio created sculptures that deviated from the academic figurative style of firefighters Memorial at 100th Street and Riverside Drive (which bears his signature) moved toward a more modern approach. “The Joy of Life,” installed above the entrance to 1 Rockefeller Plaza in 1937, is a polychrome bas-relief that seems closer to some of Pablo Picasso’s works than to those of Mr. French.
Among Piccirilli’s three original works on display at the Met is “Fragilina” (1923), an ethereal, idealized female nude in marble of Attilio with weakened arms and simplified facial features and hair. Ms. Tolles, the museum’s curator, said the work shows the artist moving toward smoother surfaces and greater stylization of forms, suggesting he was “not as tied to the American sculptural tradition and perhaps more willing to experiment.” .
Mr. Montes-Bradley, who not long ago made a pilgrimage to see “Fragilina,” responded more emotionally.
“It shows more than it reveals, and it reveals more than it shows,” he said of the statue.
Attilio Piccirilli died in the 142nd Street studio in 1945 and was buried with his family in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Today, the only piece of jewelry marking the many graves on the family’s main property is a bronze sculpture by Attilio. It is called “Mater Amorosa” and is a copy of two figures from the Maine Monument, a mother comforting a grieving child.
The Piccirillis’ mother was so important to them that after her death in Italy in 1921, they had her body transported to New York. Perhaps Attilio, creator of the heartbreaking sculpture “The Outcast,” felt at home in America for the first time at the moment of her funeral in the Bronx.
“It is like burying someone you loved in the soil of a country,” he said in 1940 Radio show about American identity, “that makes you realize that you belong to this soil forever.”