VINCENZO GEMITO | IL FILOSOFO (THE PHILOSOPHER)

Sotheby's London, 23 November 2010, lot 124;

private collection, Europe

This dramatic bust known as The Philosopher encapsulates Gemito’s heart and soul as a sculptor. It brings together his total devotion to the antique combined with a deeply personal observation of life around him in Naples – in this case finding inspiration in the rugged bearded face of his father-in-law and collaborator Masto Ciccio. At the same time the bust seems as much to be a reflection of Gemito’s most intimate thoughts and concerns; the bust seems, in many ways, to be as much a philosophical self-portrait and foreshadows the physical appearance of the sculptor himself in later life.

Gemito first modelled The Philosopher in 1883 and cast it in his own foundry in the via Mergellina, which had been opened with the support of the Belgian industrialist Oscar de Mesnil. A photograph of 1888 shows Gemito and his workmen, including Masto Ciccio, outside the foundry with the bust on the ground in front of them (fig. 1). Ciccio is in the centre of the group wearing a hat, looking indeed very like The Philosopher. Gemito was inspired by the bust of the so-called Seneca in the Museo Nazionale in Naples. The bust was a great success and many casts were made. In fact, Gemito re-worked the model 30 years later with a more naturalistic modelling, with greater detail in the beard, with pronounced wrinkles around the eyes and the teeth precisely chiseled. An example of this rare second version is in the Chines Collection, Rome (see Champion, op. cit., p. 164). Gemito subsequently exhibited the bust at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 and three years later at the Venice V Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte. 

RELATED LITERATURE

Temi di Vincenzo Gemito, exh.cat., Palazzo Racani Arconi, Spoleto, 1989, p. 116, cat. 42; I. Wardropper & L. Licht, Chiseled with a brush: Italian Sculpture 1860-1925 from the Gilgore Collections, Chicago, 1994, p. 90, no. 20; J.-L. Champion, ‘Le Retour a l’Antique’, in Gemito. Le Sculpteur de l’ame Napolitaine, exh. cat., Petit Palais, Paris, 2019, pp. 162-167, p. 218, no. 107