Costantino Barbella's sculptures, present in important public collections in Italy and abroad as well as in prestigious private collections tell a crucial phase in the history of our nineteenth century. The artist enjoyed great success in life - and already at a young age, fascinating high society collecting even beyond national borders with small bronzes and terracotta. What was unanimously recognized by critics and collectors was the ability to narrate, with a singular lyrical inspiration, the popular reality of central-southern Italy. In fact, in the vast production of genre scenes of the second Neapolitan nineteenth century, including paintings and sculptures, those of the Theatine artist stand out for a marked accent of humanity, as well as for an archaic taste similar to that of the paintings of the fellow countryman Francesco Paolo Michetti. Thanks to an aesthetic based on the search for values of grace and elegance, very far from the caricaturist nature of other interpreters of genre scenes of his time, the characters of Barbella happily surpass the anecdote. Portraits of peasants and saleswomen at work therefore take on monumental connotations, even within the limits of table sculptures: yet, the artist does not idealize the people, but rather represents them in their most lively authenticity. This was not lost on critics, and in particular his friend Gabriele D'Annunzio, who wrote several times - and in more than flattering terms - about Barbella's sculptural production. Like Michetti, the sculptor was fully aware of the rural reality that stood as the protagonist of his art and for which he always nourished a sense of belonging, perhaps even in a more intimate way than the other personalities of the so-called "Michetti cenacle" (namely that group of intellectuals who met periodically in the Franciscan convent of Francavilla al Mare purchased in the mid-1880s by Michetti: among others, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Francesco Paolo Tosti, Edoardo Scarfoglio, Antonio De Nino).

The four terracottas presented here effectively summarize the salient features of Barbellian production. Although he has often brilliantly measured himself with life-size figures, it is undoubtedly in the small-sized sculptures that the Theatine best expressed his artistic vision [1] . According to the bibliography, his predilection for small terracotta statues should be connected to his early youth, that is to say, to the period in which he made "trinkets and colonial genres" for his paternal shop  [2] ; small nativity figurines, already revealing an uncommon talent. Talent that allowed him to obtain a subsidy granted by the Province of Chieti to study in Naples, where he attended the courses of Stanislao Lista (former teacher of Vincenzo Gemito, also born in 1852). In the former capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies he also obtained his first important recognitions: at the exhibition of the promoting company "Salvator Rosa" in 1874 the group The joy of innocence after work went to Vittorio Emanuele II, who assigned it to the collections of the Capodimonte museum, where it is still preserved today. The exploit took place in 1877 at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Naples - the same in which Michetti exhibited The procession of Corpus Domini in Chieti - when he presented the famous group entitled The love song (fig. 2), a sculpture which, by his own admission, gave him "money and fame" and "moral satisfaction to be nominated, for special merits, unique among the exhibiting sculptors, honorary professor of the Royal Institute of Fine Arts" [3] . The success of the work was such as to push him to create more bronze castings - even over the coming decades, presented at exhibitions with different titles - and to create new sculptures inspired by the same theme. Among these, there is Armonia ( lot 165 ), in which the artist takes up two of the three figures of The love song intervening with slight changes on some details of the pose and clothing. A bronze specimen was purchased by the former chedivè Isma'il Pascià at the "Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome" in 1883.

In the same venue Barbella exhibited another of his most acclaimed sculptures: Soli ( lot 164 ), already presented in Paris in 1879  [4] with the title Basket of love and in Milan in 1881 as No one sees us (fig. 1). The sculptor later made several copies, both in terracotta and bronze, due to numerous requests received following the enthusiasm shown by the critics. One of these was purchased for his own collections by King Umberto I in 1889 [5] . "The modeling of the soft parts in the female figures of Barbella is admirable, it has something of a caress", wrote Gabriele D'Annunzio years after the first public appearance of the group sculptural: "The whole torso of the woman in the Basket of Love, just ripe, almost contained and compressed in its grace and closed in her youth as in the envelope of a rose bowl, is of a spirating vitality" [6] . The work inaugurated a whole series of sculptures on the theme of the love relationship between men and women, naturally from a popular perspective, which the artist exhibited with his usual success in Italy and abroad. Of these, critics seemed to appreciate not only the capacity for psychological introspection, but also the finesse of the details - in whose pictorial effects one can see the influence of the Catalan Mariano Fortuny - and the technical expertise in directing the bronze castings. Indeed, the sculptures created by Barbella starting from the 1880s show a renewed attention to patination and to the rendering of the chiselling (perhaps in a sort of remote comparison with Vincenzo Gemito, who from the opening of the foundry in 1883 began to conduct research analogous).

Barbella's ability to deal with matter emerges not only from the finished and patinated sculptures, but also in the pieces left voluntarily in the draft state, such as the present study for The cherry ( lot 167 ), which in the smallest details has the flavor of a goldsmith's artifact. Even more than the final version (fig. 4), this terracotta dated by the artist to January 17, 1894 effectively restores the freshness of the impression in fixing "that moment of tiredness and boredom that those girls who, in addition to they must show their graces and submit to the whims and jokes of the buyers" [8] . With the new titles Al mercato, Tristezza and Venditrice di Ciliege, the final bronze casting was exhibited on several occasions in the last luster of the nineteenth century . This is how Luigi Pirandello spoke of it in a review of the 1895 exhibition at the Society of Amateurs and Cultors of Fine Arts in Rome: "[…] represents a young peasant woman selling cherries. And she too is a cherry, which Barbella will undoubtedly sell, and well, according to the usual" [9] . The Sicilian writer was not mistaken in his predictions: the work was purchased by the Russian government, in 1898, at the "First Italian Art Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in Petersburg".

The international success of her works led Barbella to undertake numerous journeys, both to bring the sculptures in person to exhibitions, and to work on portrait commissions to be performed from life. In 1904 he went to London - where he found his friend Francesco Paolo Tosti - to take part with a large solo exhibition at the "Italian Exhibition" at the Earls Court Exhibition Center: there, he sold numerous sculptures and obtained commissions for portraits of characters from the high society, he was asked to create a sculptural group depicting the wounding of Admiral Nelson ( lot 166 ). The artist made it on his return to his homeland, and then ordered a casting at the Nelli foundries in Rome, presented in 1905 to the Royal United Service Institution at the palace of Whitehall (now in Greenwich at the National Maritime Museum) on the occasion of the celebrations for the centenary of the battle of Trafalgar. The present terracotta version of the group is particularly suitable here for documenting the mature phase of the artistic activity of Costantino Barbella, in the first decade of the twentieth century still at the height of fame (fig. 3). Subsequently, with the tumultuous arrival of modernity and the avant-garde, his figure became more and more secluded on the national scene, continuing however to count on important commissions and on the unanimous recognition of a career by now consigned to the history of art.

Manuel Carrera

July 2020

 [1] On the subject, see: P. Orano, Un grande scultore di statue piccine: Costantino Barbella, in “Il Secolo XX”, settembre 1906, pp. 706-719; A. Amoroso, Il grande scultore del piccolo, in “La patria degli italiani”, 9 dicembre 1925.