VINCENZO GEMITO | PORTRAIT BUST OF DOMENICO MORELLI

Gemito convincingly set out his credentials as one of the greatest portrait sculptors of the late 19th century at the Paris Salon of 1887. He exhibited four busts of a contemporary composer, designer and two painters: Giuseppe Verdi, Mariano Fortuny, Francesco Paolo Michetti, together with his bust of Domenico Morelli which was received to great critical acclaim. The busts were all created by the young Gemito in Naples in a vibrant creative period between 1873 and 1875 (see Petit Palais, op. cit.). 

Gemito depicts the 50-year-old Morelli at the height of his career. Morelli himself commissioned the bust and no doubt influenced the innovative appearance of the bust, in which the Neapolitan painter’s shoulders slope one way, whilst he looks up and to the side the other way. Morelli is shown as if momentarily distracted from painting, wearing a simple frock and painter's cap. It reflects in many respects Morelli’s own self-portrait of around 1840 in the Uffizi, Florence. The handsome and confident 27-year-old painter with a mass of black hair is echoed in a more rugged (and probably rather balding), yet distinguished professor at the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti, of whom the 21-year-old sculptor Gemito must have been in awe.

Gemito’s original terracotta (exhibited in Naples in 1877 and then at the 1878 Paris Exposition universelle) is in the Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Naples (inv. no. 16294). In addition to the prime bronze in the Morelli collection (see Di Giacomo 1928, op. cit.), only a few other bronze casts are known in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (inv. no. OA8969), in the Minozzi collection, in the Naples, Banco di Napoli (formerly in the Consolazio collection), and one sold Sotheby’s, Milan, 5 December 2005, lot 241.

RELATED LITERATURE

S. Di Giacomo, Gemito, Napoli 1905 (1988), pp.49–52; S. Di Giacomo, Vincenzo Gemito: Vita e Opere, Milan, 1928, pl. XI; M. de Marinis, Gemito, Roma 1993, figs. 50-51; Temi di Vincenzo Gemito, exh.cat., Palazzo Racani Arconi, Spoleto, 1989, p. 116, cat. 42; J.-L. Champion, 'Les Portraits d'Artistes', in Gemito. Le Sculpteur de l’ame Napolitaine, exh. cat., Petit Palais, Paris, 2019, pp. 52-62, nos. 33-34