Hopeless beyond Redemption

"Most of us think of modern Italian sculpture as
hopeless beyond redemption.
We recall the plastic jokes, the brazen indecencies,
the chiseled vulgarities
. . . . . we shudder at memories of the Campo Santa of Genoa
and of recent monuments all over Italy,
and we dismiss the subject."









"Biondi's Saturnalia epitomized cruelly. but not unjustly,
the trend of contemporary sculpture in Italy,
with all its misplaced effort and its incredible,
if not to say fiendish, dexterity."




"This disgustingly facile performance seemed to this writer
like a kind of 'wake' over the corpse of a once noble national art
which once produced the Augustus and later
the Saint George and the Moses;
which has long been dead but which men refuse to bury."





Some hard words from Loredo Taft,
lovingly quoted by Carptrash
my favorite "Scholar without portfolio"

(who seems to have finally tired of getting edited
by the school children of Wikipedia)


Meanwhile, these wonderful photos
have been lifted from this great blog




The piece was made in 1899,
and seems to have been controversial
ever since.

This copy in Buenos Aires was removed from public display
during a period of political repression,
but now has been re-installed in a botanical garden.

Which is just where it belongs!
(hopefully to become partially overgrown
with surrounding vegetation)

It's somewhere between great sculpture
and a theme-park display.

(like the sculpture-sex -park on Cheju Island)

(and I can see how it appealed to the animation artist
who took these photos.)