Piccirilli Brothers of New York
Gary Waller
It is from the website http://www.fga.it/altreitalie/15_saggi1a.htm
celebrating the immigrant Italians contribution to American art history.
" In all art books on American sculpture we read that Daniel Chester French
is the sculptor of the extraordinary Seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington D.C. Recently the story of that sculpture, possibly the most
famous in the United States has been told again in a popular magazine by
Prof. Lloyd Ultan. He stated that the actual statue was sculpted in the
Piccirilli Studio at 4467 East 142 Street, where D.C. French had brought his
clay model about 60 inches tall to be translated into a statue of about 7
meters high weighing 175 tons. It took 7 marble blocks and 20 carvers, with
Attilio Piccirilli and his brothers doing the most delicate parts, head and
hands. In 1922 after one and a half years of work the statue, on four
railroad cars arrived in Washington.
The documentation was deposited by Prof. Ultan in the Bronx County
Historical Society in the Bronx, giving that embattled community so tried by
problems of poverty and crime a source of great pride and self esteem.
Vincent Palumbo said that «the sculptor has the imagination to do
the model (è il modellatore) but the marble carver is only the
"smodellatore" who brings out the statue from the model.» In some cases
perhaps the marble carver is something more than the mere translator of
genius. When we look at Lincoln's eyes, we see something that only a great
sculptor could express. "