The first half of Medardo Rosso’s biography is stereotypical of any nineteenthcentury
sculptor’s. A student at the Brera Academy in 1883, Rosso was soon
expelled for disruptive conduct, and six years later he moved to Paris, where he
was to live for most of his life. There he interacted with powerful critics, art
dealers, patrons and artists such as Zola, Rodin, Degas, Edmond De Goncourt, Paul
Alexis, Henri Rouart, Georges Petit and Adolphe Goupil, among others.
Then, inexplicably, something happened. In 1906, after completing a portrait
of a child of the Mond family, Ecce Puer, he stopped creating new subjects. Puzzled
scholars at one time considered this period ‘inactive’ or ‘non-creative’, but in fact
Rosso was highly productive. From 1906 until his death in 1928, he focused
intently on writing his art theories and on producing sculptural replicas and
photographic reiterations of his own sculpture. This work has been read as
repetitive, and the multiple casts have generated a series of problems regarding
their attribution, chronology and authenticity.1
This article will demonstrate how,
contrary to the opinion of previous scholarship, the second half of Rosso’s career
was dedicated to the achievement of his artistic goals through the creative
medium of photography. As will be explained below, Rosso created sculpture
which he intended should be seen exclusively from a unique vantage point – the
same as that from which the artist received his ‘first impression’ of the subject –
so that the observer could share his emotion. This viewing modality is the visual
equivalent of observing a flat object. Because a photograph is an exact twodimensional
representation of an image perceived from a unique point of view,
the best visual translation of Rosso’s aesthetic theory lies in the photographs of
his own sculpture, which were crucial in securing his place in the history of art.
One of Rosso’s peculiar demands on the observer is that he or she should
consider his sculpture as if it were a painting. ‘My work must be looked at as a
painting, from the optical distance, where it recomposes itself with the
collaboration of your retina’2
and ‘a work of sculpture is not made to be touched,
but to be seen at such or such distance, according to the effect intended by the
artist. Our hand does not permit us to bring to our consciousness the values, the
tones, the colours – in a word, the life of the thing. For seizing the inner
significance of a work of art, we should rely entirely on the visual impression.’3
Often presented to the public in vitrines, Rosso’s sculpture appeared to be visually
contained in a sort of frame provided by the glass case’s lead joints, which marked
Sculpting the immaterial,
modelling the light: presenting
Medardo Rosso’s photographic
oeuvre
Francesca Bacci
223 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
the frontier between space within and space without. The equivalence claimed by
Rosso between a painting and his sculpture is not limited to the appearance of the
work, but is instead of an ontological nature. From the Renaissance onwards, the
painted surface had acquired the status of ‘window’, open onto a reality that
continues beyond the physical limits of the canvas. When confronted with, for
example, Degas’ Place de la Concorde (1875, Hermitage), one notices that the
flaneur with a walking stick, while observing Monsieur Lepic, is literally entering
the painting from the left side. Degas portrayed only half of his body, to convey
this sense of movement and urgency, but the observer invariably remembers
having seen the whole figure, with the missing left side supplied via mental
completion. This instinctive process functions very effectively for representations
in two dimensions, and it has been reinforced by the modern practice of looking
at photographs. Everyone knows, in fact, that reality continues beyond the
portion encompassed by the camera’s viewfinder. Rather than just providing the
finishing touch, the frame becomes the conceptual place that marks the
transition between the physical edge of the painting and its mental continuation.
However, the visual completion of partially represented figures does not occur
spontaneously when observing a sculpture. Just as a sculpture according to Rosso
is a three-dimensional equivalent of a painting, so he established a conceptual
three-dimensional equivalent of the frame by encasing the sculpture in a glass
cage. And as a painting comprises all of the elements which are encompassed by
its frame, so Rosso’s oeuvre is all that is contained by the ‘cage’:4
the sculpture and
the air surrounding it. The vitrine makes the substantial sameness of matter and
air almost physically tangible, actualizing one of Rosso’s tenets: ‘nothing is
material in space’.5
The lead joints of the glass case become, by analogy, the
sculpture’s frame, beyond which reality continues limitlessly.6
With this formal
solution, Rosso brilliantly resolved the theoretical problem of the continuity of
space that the material nature of sculpture poses.
This is consistent with Rosso’s opinion that ‘nothing in this world can detach
itself from its surroundings’.7
The space within the ‘cage’ should be understood as
the circumscription of a specific portion of space, a paradigmatic pars pro toto to
be multiplied infinitely. The artist’s selection can be defined as abstract, in the
original meaning of the word – to abstract as in to ‘pull out of’– as he pulled out
from the flux of time a fleeting image and the space it encapsulated and by which
it was surrounded, the two forming an indissoluble unity. His photographs
develop two-dimensionally Rosso’s work on space and selection. The glass case is
staged and recreated in the photographs through several different interventions.
Frequently the edge of the paper coincides conceptually with the lead structure of
the glass case. Almost all of Rosso’s photographs have been cut irregularly all
around the edges, often leaving a big fraction of the original image out, as one can
see by comparing them with the original plates they were printed from. In some
cases, this idea is stressed by leaving dark borders of wholly exposed
photographic paper at the margins. In these interventions one senses the
frustration posed by the unavoidable presence of the physical limits of the image.
Furthermore, photography was useful to Rosso to enhance the intended effect
of his sculpture. As already remarked, most of Rosso’s photographs present an
224 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
unusual shape and irregular edges, obtained either by cutting with a pair of
scissors or by tearing the paper manually. Often the two vertical or the two
horizontal edges are not parallel. Consider, for example, his photographs of
L’uomo che legge (1894, figs 1 and 2). With this sculpture Rosso created a
challenging perspective through which he conferred the illusion of a vision from
a vantage point situated above the street level and made the space tense with
movement. The photographic work on this subject greatly enhances this spaceactivating
effect through the irregular cutting of the prints. These, in fact, are cut
with either the left or right margin parallel to the ideal line running from the
head to the toes of the walking man, while the other edge is cut diagonally in
several different ways.
The ‘motion effect’ that the photographs by Rosso impart to his sculpture can
be simply explained as the result of the visual application of a simple law of
physics. When two forces pull a given body in different directions the result is that
a body’s motion has intensity equal to the vector sum of the two forces. The
divergence between the two directions represented by the cut margins of the
photographs is crucial to the effect of motion. In these prints, Rosso used this
simple principle to interpret the sculpture according to two different dynamic
effects. When the photograph is cut narrower at the bottom and wider at the top,
the observer senses a forward movement of the man’s torso, wedged in an
ascending space, as if seen from above (fig. 1), while, when the photograph is cut
wider at the bottom and narrower on top, the emphasis is on the fan-shaped
movement of the legs, as if the energy of the stride were setting in motion the
footpath below (fig. 2). This idea was to be more fully realized nearly twenty years
later, in the representation of movement by Giacomo Balla (Dynamism of a dog
on a leash, 1912), in the work of the Futurist photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia
(The bow, 1911), and in Marcel Duchamp (Nude descending a staircase, 1912),
among others.
Rosso’s manipulation of the photographic image is not limited to
modifications of the finished prints, but encompasses interventions carried out
during the printing process as well. One notable instance of this is his use of
contrast and luminosity, determined by his leaving the negative and sensitized
paper under the light for a shorter or a longer time than necessary. When
printing, the longer the paper is exposed to the light, the richer and blacker the
dark tones are going to be; the less the paper is exposed the fainter these areas are
going to turn out. Photographers use this characteristic of the printing process to
compensate, at least partially, for a weak or excessive contrast of the negative
through a longer or shorter exposure time. Rosso, instead, used this technique to
achieve a reduction or exaggeration of the dominant tones, or the softening or
disappearance of the lighter ones.
Let us consider two of Rosso’s prints of La Portinaia (figs 3 and 4). Twenty of
the prints of this subject were obtained from the same original shot, which has
been re-photographed and reprinted several times. Rosso worked on printing with
progressively shorter exposure times, so that in the end the print in figure 4
appears to look like a drawing rather than a photograph. Its reddish, almost sepia,
hue enhances the effect further. This ‘drawing effect’ obtained by the
225 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
1. Medardo Rosso, L’uomo che
legge, post 1894, original print,
103 * 29 mm (overall)
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
2. Medardo Rosso, L’uomo che
legge, post 1894, original print,
138 * 64 mm (overall)
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
manipulation of the contrast and luminosity of the image constitutes a strong
visual statement of Rosso’s theoretical belief that ‘for me, what is important in art
is to make one forget matter’.8
The ambiguity between the material nature of the
three-dimensional sculptural object and its photographic rendering is well
summarized in one anecdote, which recurs several times in the literature on
226 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
4. Medardo Rosso, La Portinaia,
post 1883, original print,
122 * 63 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
3. Medardo Rosso, La Portinaia,
post 1883, original print,
82 * 35 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
Rosso, describing the visit of Degas to his studio. When Rosso showed him a
photograph of the destroyed work Impression d’Omnibus (1884), Degas asked
whether it was the photo of a painting. When confronted with prints such as the
one in question, it is easy to empathize with Degas’ perplexity. Rosso was
extremely proud of the misunderstanding, feeling that he had achieved his stated
artistic goal.9
Rosso also produced an assortment of photographs of his own drawings,
which, on several occasions, he signed and mounted on a cardboard background,
both to prevent them curling and also to serve as a passe-partout. When presented
in such a fashion, these photographs were difficult to distinguish from the
original drawings, and thus acquired the status of finished works in their own
right. Comparing visually these drawing-esque photographic renderings of
Rosso’s sculptures with the prints of his actual drawings, one feels that they share
a common territory, in which the materiality of the object is lost in its ambiguous
appearance and becomes irrelevant.
227 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
5. Medardo Rosso, La Portinaia,
post 1883, original print,
116 * 87 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
Another principle of Rosso’s aesthetic theory asserted that one had to sculpt
‘the dominant’, the essence of the vision which remains visible after all the rest
has been eaten away by strong lighting.10
As result of this rarefaction process, his
sculptures present a consistent exclusion of detail to focus on the main features
of the subject. The treatment of the eyes, the ears, the hair and lips of the
characters represented is one of contour-less suggestion rather than literal
depiction. Yet the essentiality of these wax and plaster visions is pushed even
further by means of photography. What happens, in fact, when one plays a strong
directional light over these already detail-less sculptures? Through this double
filter, which dramatically reduces the range of greys into two or three dominant
tones and unifies more subtle tonal distinctions into a single tone, Rosso could
extract the very essence of the image. The dramatic contrasts, in Rosso’s print of
La Portinaia (fig. 5), confer on the picture the expressive strength of a woodcut.
Rosso himself evaluated the effectiveness of his lighting by means of pushing all
of the greys towards blacks or whites. He did this by producing series of
photographs of a photograph of a photograph, which resulted in something
similar to a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. There is indeed an analogy
between this modus operandi and the production of sculptural replicas, obtained
by taking casts of casts. In the case of sculpture, though, the further the replica is
from the original, the more blurred the detail will become, while the
photographic work often grows more iconic with every passage.
At the same time, besides satisfying Rosso’s artistic aims, his print in figure 5 is
actually the clearest possible two-dimensional representation of the old woman’s
face. The human ability to recognize faces presented as images where black and
white contrasts have been maximized has been studied
by cognitive psychologists for almost half a century.
Such representations are currently called‘Mooney
faces’, from the name of the scientist who created them
in the first place.11
These are defined as ‘thresholded’
photographs of faces that can be perceived either
as a face or as a collection of unrelated blobs.
Recognition depends on the observer’s awareness
of the nature of the image presented. If informed
that it is a face, he or she will see it immediately. A
good example of the Mooney face effect is a selfportrait
by Rosso, now lost (fig. 6). This phenomenon
explains why Medardo Rosso’s sculpture aroused
such controversy among the public. Reading reviews
and newspapers articles ranging from the 1890s to
the 1920s, one often finds comments such as ‘the
adoption of generalization cannot excuse Medardo
Rosso’s figures, bruised, and too similar to sculptures
in mud and snow . . .’,12
or ‘some blocks of bronze,
without a doubt badly extracted from their mould,
seem to me to represent merely a formless mass
whose purpose I cannot divine’.13
228 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
6. Medardo Rosso, Rosso dessiné
par lui même, ante 1898,
published in Le Journal, 6 June
1898. Present location of the
original unknown
It was necessary, for their correct interpretation, that viewers looking at these
sculptures for the first time should have some expectation of what they were
supposed to see. The perception of Rosso’s sculptures as senseless blobs is
physiologically natural, when these are observed from the wrong angle and in the
wrong light. The patches of tone, when formed by the correct lighting and
considered exclusively from the correct angle, do conjure up perfectly
recognizable faces once one knows they are there. No wonder that most of Rosso’s
admirers were people who took the trouble to understand the pieces and who
followed the sculptor’s viewing instruction regarding angle of observation and
lighting, what Rosso defined as ‘the unique point of view’. Once grasped, the
vision remains present in its entire efficacy in one’s consciousness, to be enjoyed
repeatedly.
Other noticeable features in the photographic work of Rosso include graphic
interventions such as pencil marks, pen strokes and graffiti, both on the prints
and on the negatives. The function of these interventions goes beyond their
aesthetic value. Once Rosso had elaborated his theory of unity, which claims the
existence of an indissoluble continuity between the figure and the surrounding
space, he found any empty spaces between his sculptural figures to be
inconsistent with it. Because such spaces have a chromatic value, they have to be
represented through solid matter. In the photographs, where present, these
spaces are filled in graphically. For example, in two prints of the lost sculpture
Paris la Nuit (1895), the space between the plaster figure of the single passer-by
and the group of a man and a woman to his left is concealed by means of
brushstrokes of white paint, in one case, and by scratching away the
photographic film in order to reveal the white of the paper beneath, in the other
(fig. 7).
In other instances pencil marks were used to maintain continuity between
the different planes within the context of one single figure. A print
representing Malato all’ospedale (1889) is a clear example of an unsuccessful
photograph (fig. 8). The lighting did not in fact succeed in conveying the result
that the artist sought. Rosso believed that, rather than composing a sculpture
considering its volumetric nature, one should instead produce planes of tone
that would appear to advance or recede visually. In this case, the white behind
the sick man’s figure seems awkwardly to come further forward than is
physically possible. Rosso tried to subdue it, first, by concealing a shadow
running across the background and finally by filling it in with grey pencil
strokes (fig. 9). This did not work, as it was not dark enough to recede when
contrasted with the deepest shadows of the man’s figure, themselves so much
blacker. All of the other prints of the Malato all’ospedale, in fact, feature a
background significantly darker than the figure, so that the latter can gain
visual prominence by contrast. In this photograph, since the shadowy areas of
the man’s body are off-black, the darkest possible background would not have
produced the desired effect. Indeed it would have flattened the image
completely by the tonal uniformity of the background and the shadows within
the figure. It is not surprising that the artist never selected this specific picture
for publication.
229 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
7. (above) Medardo Rosso,
Impression de boulevard. Paris la
Nuit, ca. 1895–96. Original print
mounted on paper, 96 * 144 mm
overall; (below) Medardo Rosso,
Impression de boulevard. Paris la
Nuit, ca. 1895–96. Original print
mounted on card, 95 * 136 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
Repetition is another characteristic of Rosso’s photographic work. There are three
processes that the artist used to create sequences of analogous – but never identical –
images. The first involved re-photographing an existing print and then printing a series
of pictures from this new negative. This operation was most often motivated by the
need to obtain a negative glass plate of an image that the artist considered successful
in conveying his intention. In Rosso’s case, the original print might often be a
newspaper clipping or a print by a professional photographer, who would for obvious
reasons have kept the negative in his archive in order to ensure for himself the lucrative
business of reprints. In order to avoid the cost of reprints, Rosso obtained a new negative
by photographing the original professional print. He also deployed this method to
make copies of portraits of himself for which he had posed at the photographer’s studio.
230 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
8. Medardo Rosso, Malato
all’ospedale, post-1889, original
print, 140 * 97 mm (overall)
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
9. Medardo Rosso, Malato
all’ospedale, post-1889, original
print, 141 * 100 mm (overall)
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
The second case of serialization is that of several prints obtained from the
same negative. These are often so different that sometimes it is only the
comparison with the original negative glass plate that discloses a relationship
between the prints. It is worth keeping in mind that every photographer chooses
the framing of his image twice: initially when shooting, by looking in the
viewfinder, and for the second time when printing, by positioning the paper in
such a way that it receives selectively what has been captured on the plate. In
Rosso’s work, there are two further framing actions: the first one performed when
composing the sculpture within verticals and horizontals (borders of a vitrine or
other visually interesting elements, such as a window sill or a stove pipe); the last
one by cutting the print with scissors, or tearing its paper by hand and affixing it
to a piece of cardboard to frame it à la passe-partout, as already described.
Of the many irregularly cropped photographs, not all have been cut after
having been printed. There are numerous examples of contact prints produced on
paper of a format significantly smaller than the negative they were obtained
from. In relative darkness, the artist has moved the sensitized paper under the
glass plate until he has positioned it in the best way to capture the ‘impression’.
The rest of the detail remains out of the picture. In the early years of photography,
a very large negative would sometimes be positioned behind the shutter, so that
the entire image brought in by the lens would be captured indiscriminately. This
resulted in a big circular negative, as the lens was round, which permitted the
printing of fifteen or twenty smaller, conventionally rectangular and different
231 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
232 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
views. It was in producing these small prints that the
photographer finally framed his shot.
Among the photographs of Ecce Puer (1906), a
series of three prints illustrates clearly the practice
just described (fig. 10). These prints were all obtained
from the same negative glass plate. From the
comparison between the negative and the prints, it is
evident that two of them, centre and right, were
cropped much smaller than the plate. This resulted in
three totally different compositions. While the print
on the left is dominated by the striking contrast
between the infantile roundness of the child’s face
and the severe dark vertical and horizontal frames
(represented by the sculptor’s easel and by the stovepipe),
the one in the centre opens a visual dialogue
between the four vertical rasps hanging on the wall
and the delicate vertical marks on the child’s
forehead. The figure seems to be pushed towards
the tools by the stove-pipe, which is no longer
recognizable as such, and serves as a repoussoir, at
the right edge of the image. Finally, the print on the
right moves in on the boy’s face, which appears to be
turning towards his right side in a circular
movement that has a strong volumetric effect.
The third case of serial production of pictures
occurs when the artist takes a succession of shots of
the same arrangement, varying slightly the angle or
the distance, or some details in the composition of
the image. An example of this procedure is provided
by two prints in figure 11, which represent Ecce Puer
set in the artist’s atelier. These carefully composed
shots feature the child’s portrait placed on an easel.
The background is enriched by the uneven colouring
of the studio wall, a semi-circular niche containing a
bowl and two pieces of fruit, a saw, some cable hanging vertically from the wall,
and some foliage to the child’s right. By shifting the shooting angle by only a few
degrees, Rosso obtained a completely different interaction between figure and
background, sculpture and surrounding objects. In the print on the right, the saw
appears no longer to touch the head, while one of the cables disappears behind it
and the foliage is almost totally obliterated. This leads to a greater focus on the
sculpture, although the efficacy of the play of lights and shadows on the portrait
itself is greater in the print on the left. Such experiments helped Rosso to study
the relationship of his works with the surrounding space, made vibrant through
the presence of the niche, which functioned both as a volumetric and as a
chromatic area that echoed the rotundity of the child’s head, making it appear to
project forward.
10. Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer,
post 1906, three original prints,
170 * 79 mm, 109 * 84 mm,
54 * 37 mm (overall)
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
One series of five small square photographs of the Rieuse resembles film
frames and produces the effect of a woman in motion turning her face towards us
(fig. 12). While Rosso was behind the camera, a studio helper held up a black cloth
to serve as a backdrop for the sculpture. By looking at the position of the base of
the Rieuse in relation to the easel, one can tell that it is the piece which has been
moved, rather than the photographer. It is precisely because this sculpture was
still so much in the round that it permitted a variety of points of view that Rosso
considered it inferior to his later work. According to the artist, the Rieuse was still
too objective and it lacked a sense of emotion, of unification of light, space and air
that was present in other work.14
From a technical point of view, the serial production of endless copies from a
single negative glass plate was unproblematic as it could be easily carried out at
home. All that was required to have a basic, but fully functional, darkroom was a
source of light covered with a red glass, or a special lantern (gas, petrol or
electric), with a shelf in front of it, a water tap and sink with, possibly, a wooden
trellis on the bottom and ideally two more shelves equipped with ceramic basins
and towels. Most photographic work at the beginning of the twentieth century
consisted of contact printing from negative glass plates using a simple device
called a ‘printing frame’, one of which Rosso owned.15
This is a glass-fronted
wooden box with a hinged lid, kept shut by springs, in which ‘the sensitive
surface of the paper is pressed into close contact with the face of the negative
while it is being exposed to the light’.16
The hinged lid allows the examination
of the photograph during the printing process, and the metal springs keep
233 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
11 Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer,
post 1906, two original prints,
124 * 81 mm, 125 * 89 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
everything firmly in place, so that the print or negative cannot shift during the
operation. Even though Rosso initially used it for its cost-effectiveness when
compared with professional photographic services, the printing frame soon
allowed him to experiment with the creation of unusual photographic prints in
the privacy of his own room. When, due to health problems in his last years, he
was often confined in his room in the Grand Hotel et de Milan, in the via Monte
di Pietá, he had it half curtained off,17
maybe, as Scolari Barr suggested, to
separate his working space from his living space, but probably also to provide
him with enough darkness to handle the unexposed sensitized paper without
spoiling it.
One of the most original results of Rosso’s photographic manipulation is a
photo-collage from installation photographs of the 1904 Paris Salon d’Automne.
On that occasion, Rosso exhibited his sculpture alongside photographic prints of
his own pieces and some of Rodin’s works. While apparently, according to the
press, this layout was not decided upon by Rosso, he did value the occasion it
provided for the public to make a comparison between himself and the French
sculptor. The episode that triggered Rosso’s eagerness to overtly prove his merits
over those of Rodin by means of comparison was the stir caused by the latter’s
public exhibition of the statue of Balzac (1898). The story goes that, while the
French master was being praised for the innovative character of his work, a
member of the public screamed ‘And Medardo Rosso?’ insinuating that Rodin had
234 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
12. Medardo Rosso, Rieuse, post
1890–91, five original prints, each
61 * 61 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
adopted a figure style inaugurated by the latter. Notices started to appear in the
press regarding Rodin’s supposed indebtedness to Rosso for the conception of his
monument. Rodin tried to ignore the matter, understanding the damage that it
would do to his reputation, and did not acknowledge Rosso as an inspiration.
Rosso reacted by openly demanding that the public judge for themselves through
the comparison of his own works placed alongside Rodin’s Torso, which the
French sculptor had given him in 1893 in exchange for Rosso’s Rieuse, in a gesture
of friendship.18
An installation shot shows the placement of Malato all’ospedale and a small
copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici in front of a wall lined with photographs
of sculptures by Rosso and Rodin (fig. 13, right half). Considering the matching
frames of all of Rodin’s works and the two different ones containing Rosso’s
prints, it is possible that the Italian might have put the latter up himself, in order
to challenge the observer. Whereas this picture may faithfully represent the
experience of the exhibition visitor, another print, made by Rosso using photocollage,
shows how he wanted this display to be seen (fig. 13, left half). I have
overlapped these two photographs in order to indicate Rosso’s ideal installation.
While the artworks occupying the right portion of this combined image illustrate
Rodin’s, Rosso’s and Michelangelo’s treatment of the full-sized human figure
(anti-clockwise: Despair, Crouching woman, Dr. Fles, Madonna Medici, Malato
all’ospedale), the left side deals with the solutions adopted to represent heads and
235 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
13. (left) Medardo Rosso, Untitled,
post-1904, original print (from a
photo-collage); (right) Medardo
Rosso (?), Confronto al Salon
(Parigi), 1904, original print
mounted on cardboard
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
busts (clockwise: Head of Sorrow, Ortolana, Rieuse, Maestrina, Bimbo alle cucine
economiche). At the very centre, the focal point of the entire narrative, one can see
Balzac, not properly a full-figure (he was rather a plastered coat) but a magnificent
head. It is worth underlining that Rosso’s claim regarded the originality of the
monument’s conception, not its artistic validity, which he acknowledged. This
photo-collage is a unique case in Rosso’s production, and was probably created by
the artist after the press and public had noticed the provocation offered by the
real photographic comparison staged on the exhibition walls.
As mentioned earlier, Rosso was flattered by Degas’ comment on a photograph
of Impression d’omnibus when, confused by the nature of the work, he mistook it
for a painting. Since Rosso believed that one of his artistic missions was to make
the observer forget matter, he introduced some contradictory elements in his
photographs, which effectively created a clever shift between the work’s two- and
three-dimensional qualities. Inspired by Degas’ comment, Rosso was perhaps
eager for the misunderstanding to recur. The most striking example of
dimensional interplay in his photographs is represented by a print of Malato
all’ospedale (fig. 14). The image shows the figure of a sick man placed on a wooden
table against a neutral backdrop. Because of the contrast between the sharpness of
the foreground and the softly blurred background, the image conveys a sense of
perspective and depth. This impression, though, is short-lived: the awareness that
this is not a three-dimensional space but, instead, a flat photograph is enforced by
the evidence of the wooden panel onto which the print was affixed to be
photographed. To avoid the merging of the wood of the background panel and
that of the table, as in the original print, the grains of the two woods are placed at
ninety degrees to one another. To further shatter the illusion of optical depth, the
236 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]
14. Medardo Rosso, Malato
all’ospedale, post-1889, original
print, 169 * 172 mm
(photo: Private collection, Italy)
black margins of the totally exposed photographic paper have been included in
the image on the right and left edges. Finally, Rosso has torn the print irregularly
by hand, to reinforce its nature as a flat piece of paper and deprive it of its
capacity to function as a window onto a real scene.
Rosso’s photographs gradually undermined the objecthood of his sculpture –
an operation that had begun much earlier with the denial of the importance of
the work’s material durability through the public exhibition of wax pieces. Rosso
worked to disintegrate the nineteenth-century integrity of the statue. He chose an
intentionally unconventional finish that appeared to eat away the sculpture as
only the passing of centuries could do, anticipating the material decay that all
matter undergoes. The form had to survive beyond its creator’s neglect –
un-patinated, with unretouched mould lines and holes, and sand-filled and
237 | Bacci: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s photographic oeuvre
1 Recent studies have attempted
to analyse the physical characteristics
of Rosso’s sculptures in order to
establish a method of ascertaining
the authenticity of a piece. This
approach, although interesting for a
technical understanding of the
sculptor’s modus operandi, has not
proven conclusive. See H. Cooper and
S. Hecker, Medardo Rosso. Second
Impressions, New Haven, CT, 2003.
2 ‘Mon ouvrage doit être regardé
comme un tableau, à la distance
optique, où il se recompose avec la
collaboration de votre rétine.’ L.
Vauxcelles, Medardo Rosso, preface to
Salon d’Automne, Catalogue des
Ouvrages de Peinture, Sculpture,
Dessin, Gravure, Architecture et Art
Décoratif (exh. cat.), Grand Palais
des Champs-Elysées, Paris, 1929,
p. 331.
3 M. Rosso, ‘Impressionism in
sculpture, an explanation’, The Daily
Mail, London, 17 October 1907.
4 ‘Gabbie’, Italian for cage, is the
word that Rosso used when referring
to the vitrines of his sculptures.
5 ‘Rien n’est matériel dans
l’espace’. Quoted in E. Claris, De
l’Impressionisme en sculpture –
Auguste Rodin et Medardo Rosso,
Éditions de ‘La Nouvelle Revue’, 1902,
p. 55.
6 The Italian critic Raffaello Giolli
referred to this concept when he
wrote, on the occasion of the Milanese
Mostra de 1900, that Rosso’s wax
sculptures were ‘under glass, like
paintings’. R. Giolli, ‘Cronache d’arte –
Gli omaggi dei Novecentisti’, Sera,
Milan, 29 March 1921.
7 Rosso, as at note 3.
8 ‘Ce qui importe pour moi en art,
c’est de faire oublier la matière.’
Quoted in Claris, as at note 5, p. 51.
9 See, for example, C. De SainteCroix,
‘Medardo Rosso’, Mercure de
France, Paris, March 1896, pp. 378–91.
The episode is on p. 379.
10 ‘Si la lumière . . . était quatre fois
plus forte, tout serait mangé, sauf une
ou deux variants. Cette dominante,
cette pensée, ce qui survit, c’est ça
qu’il faut sculpter.’ M. Rosso, quoted
in C. Aurel, Rodin devant la femme.
Fragment inédits de Rodin. Sa technique
par lui-même, Maison du livre,
1919, p. 176.
11 C. M. Mooney, ‘Age in the
development of closure ability in
children’, Canadian Journal of
Psychology XI, 4, 1957, pp. 219–26.
12 ‘Le parti-pris de généralisation
n’excuse pas les figures en compotes
et trop semblables aux sculptures en
boue et neige de M. Médardo Rosso.’
Samas [sic], Le Chroniqueur de Paris,
3 November 1904.
13 ‘ . . . certain bloc de bronze,
sans doute mal sorti du moule, m’a
semblé ne constituer qu’une masse
informe don’t je n’ai pu discerner
l’utilité . . .’ P. Mocéna, Tam Tam,
22 October 1904.
14 See C. Carrà, ‘La mia vita’, in
M. Carrà, Tutti gli scritti, Feltrinelli,
1978, p. 722.
15 For a presentation of the evidence
proving Rosso’s authorship of
the photographic works here discussed,
see F. Bacci, ‘Impressions in
light: photographs of sculptures by
Medardo Rosso (1858–1929)’, unpub.
PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2004,
pp. 11–38.
16 W. E. Woodbury, The
Encyclopædic Dictionary of
Photography, Arno Press, 1979, sub
voce ‘Printing Frame’, p. 402 (1st edn:
The Scovill & Adams Company of New
York, 1898).
17 This information comes from
M. Scolari-Barr, ‘Medardo Rosso and
his Dutch patroness Etha Fles’,
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek,
13, 1962, p. 249.
18 Flammèche [sic], ‘Echos: Notes
d’Art’, L’Estafette, Paris, 20 December
1893. The artist is recorded as having
publicly used the ‘comparison pieces’,
including Rodin’s Torso, on five occasions:
at the Paris 1900 World
Exhibition, at the Paris 1904 Salon
d’Automne, at the Wien 1905 Artaria
exhibition, at the London 1906
Cremetti Gallery show, and at the
Florence 1910 Lyceum exhibition.
unrefined surfaces. By reducing the three-dimensionality of the sculpture to the
two dimensions of its photographic rendering, Rosso subtracted the form from
its materiality, hence from the flow of time, thus preventing it from changing. For
the first time in a sculptor’s work, permanence was achieved not in marble or
bronze, but with simple sensitized paper.
238 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]