47 VINCENZO GEMITO
Italian (Naples), 1852-1929
Medusa, 1911
Parcel-gilt silver
Diameter: 23.5 cm {9lA in.)
Inscribed at the bottom center of
the obverse: 1911, GEMITO
86.SE.528In several respects Vincenzo Gemito's life is the stuff of which nineteenth-century
novels were made. Abandoned at birth on the doorstep of a foundling home, the
nameless infant was recorded in the customary fashion as Genito (literally "begotten"
in Italian), which by a slip of the pen became the more poetically accurate Gemito
("wail" or "moan"). As a street urchin at the age of nine, he found work in the studio
of a painter. In 1868, when he was only sixteen, he exhibited at the Protomotrice
di Napoli, and his work was bought for the city. While working on two important
state commissions, Gemito experienced a serious mental depression. In 1887 he was
committed to a sanitarium, but he immediately ran away and returned home, where
for about twenty years he remained hidden in a single room, secluded from the outside
world, seeing only a few friends and working intermittently on subjects readily at
hand (drawings of dead fish, for example, and portraits of his wife). In 1909-1910
he returned to the world. From this time until his death in 1929 he led a relatively
normal life, continuing to draw and to sculpt in the vein he had established before
his self-imposed withdrawal.
His works display a search for formal beauty based on Hellenistic ideals and a
mastery of craftsmanship which rivals that of Renaissance artists. The Getty Medusa
is closely based upon the greatest surviving cameo from antiquity, the Tazza Farnese,
which the artist must have studied at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.
Gemito used the scale motif of stretched snakeskin, which appears at the outer edge126 EUROPEAN SCULPTURE