Читать книгу The Museo Vincenzo Vela in Ligornetto - Marc-Joachim Wasmer - Страница 6

Enrico Gamba, Portrait of Vincenzo Vela, c. 1857, colour pastels on paper.

Immediately after Vela’s first commission, the Monument to Giuseppe Maria Luvini, Bishop of Pesaro (VIII) for the new city hall in Lugano, which won him major recognition at the Brera exhibition of 1844, Vela completed sepulchres for Maddalena Adami-Bozzi in Pavia and Cecilia Rusca in Locarno (c. 1845–1846, XX). The two sculptural groups he created were innovative in Italian funerary art: for the first time mourning figures, usually depicted as allegorical characters, were represented with touching immediacy, portrayed with the faces of the deceased’s family, and dressed in everyday clothes.

Although this genre was a key feature of Vela’s art from this moment on, he nonetheless explored more ‘worldly‘ themes and genres, including the portrait. In fact, in 1846 he executed for Duke Giulio Litta The Morning Prayer (XXI), a genre sculpture in which the religious theme is simply a pretext. Many considered the kneeling figure of the young woman in a nightdress to be a masterpiece due to its realism. However, a suspicion soon spread among critics that the sculptor had used plaster casts of the model and even of the fabric – which in fact he had – to make the piece, thus ignoring academic rules. Yet, with its incomparable naturalism that plays on pictorial values, the finely rendered physiognomy, and soft modelling – which, combined with the narrative element, evoke the figures in a waxworks – the piece melds tried and tested compositional models and early painting traditions with contemporary content. Thus, Vela’s work immediately met the taste of an influential elite, composed of liberal exponents of the Lombard nobility and the nascent upper middle class, whose common goal was to courageously resist the occupying power: the Austrian Monarchy that had governed since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Vela’s art, whose vigorous style challenged the obligations and practices of the old school, soon became the cultural manifesto of the Milanese. The rising star was courted by men of letters and patrons, who had long awaited his arrival.

Vincenzo Vela, Monument to Giuseppe Maria Luvini, Bishop of Pesaro, 1844, plaster cast of Vincenzo Vela’s statue in Lugano 1895.

Vincenzo Vela, Morning Prayer, 1846, plaster original, three perspectives.