Medardo Rosso

Peridot Gallery, New York (acquired by 1959)
Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, Peridot Gallery, The First Exhibition in America of Sculpture by Medardo Rosso, 1958-59, no. 1, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Medardo Rosso, 1963

Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, New York, 1963, illustrated p. 22 (with incorrect medium and erroneously catalogued as belonging to the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection, New York) 

There are various stable cracks, the largest of which runs across the figure's neck, and has been retouched. Otherwise this work is in good condition.
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Lo Scaccino, or The Sacristan, is one of several versions of this subject that Medardo Rosso executed in plaster, wax and bronze, inspired by the old beadle of the church of San Marco in Milan. In the present work, Rosso attached his plaster of the man's profile to a wooden holy water font. The artist himself certainly held Lo Scaccino in high esteem, as he chose another version of this work, now destroyed, together with several other sculptures, as his most advanced works for inclusion in the Second International Exhibition in Venice in 1887, which was later to become the Venice Biennale. At that exhibition, the work was titled Se la fusse grappa ('If only it were grappa'), reflecting the artist's witty approach to his subject.

 

Margaret Scolari Barr discussed the present work: 'The Sacristan [...] marks the sudden maturing of Rosso the sculptor and, in a way, the resurgence of his painterly vision. His clay takes on a soft, modulated, nacreous quality in which passages of light and shadow glide in sfumato transitions or come up sharply in light-catching revelatory ridges like a white scumbling nervously laid upon a transparent glaze. The Sacristan is not a caricature; nothing anecdotal mars the compassionate interpretation of the head as – deeply bowed – it casts its shadow on a neutral background, while the alcoholic nose is handled with such sensitive discretion that it merely serves as a guide to the tragic cavities of the eye and mouth, all seen in the still blue-gray air of stale church incense (M. Scolari Barr, op. cit., pp. 22-23).

 

The human face was Rosso's favourite subject, and Hilton Kramer commented on the realism of his sculpture: 'Rosso was one of those artists – Courbet and Daumier were other – who looked to the immediate scene both out of a natural sympathy and as a mean of breaking through the inherited pieties of an exalted and phony canon of beauty. His realism was thus motivated by a quest for purity, and the purist aspect of his work was abetted by a desire to render the truth' (H. Kramer, 'Medardo Rosso', in Arts, December 1959).

 

Lo Scaccino comes from the estate of Louis Pollack, founder of the Peridot Gallery in New York. It was at this gallery that Rosso's art was first presented to the American audience in an exhibition held at 1958-59, which included the present work.