Lot 93: GIUSEPPE MORETTI 1857-1935 A RARE MARBLE FIGURE: HERCULES AND THE SERPENTS LATE 19TH OR EARLY 20TH

GIUSEPPE MORETTI 1857-1935 A RARE MARBLE FIGURE: HERCULES AND THE SERPENTS LATE 19TH OR EARLY 20TH CENTURY

the winged infant with raised arms strangling two bronze snakes, inscribed G Moretti Sc, on a veined marble base.

height 40 in. (101.5cm)

Giuseppe Moretti was born in Siena in 1857 and trained in Florence in a wide variety of techniques and media. In order to focus on marble carving, he moved to Carrara. Following a period in Croatia, he worked in Vienna, where his commissions included a marble portrait bust of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and later Budapest, before emigrating to the United States in 1888. His first recognition in this country came when Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt's architect, Richard Morris Hunt, hired Moretti to produce the interior marble decoration for Marble House in Newport.

In the decades that followed, Moretti built a successful career sculpting mainly public monuments, including the fifty-six-foot cast-iron "Vulcan". Commissioned as Birmingham, Alabama's contribution to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, the work now rests in Birmingham's Vulcan Park. Moretti, who lived in Alabama for many years, is credited with discovering the artistic use of Alabama marble, particularly that of Sylacauga, which boasts the hardest and whitest marble in the world. Moretti's first use of Alabama marble was the "Head of Christ" which was also shown at the 1904 World's Fair.

Following Moretti's death in 1935, his pupil, Geneva Mercer, assisted by his widow, compiled a comprehensive list of his work. Revised by Miriam R. Fowler, curator of the Birmingham Museum of Art's 2002 exhibition, Giuseppe Moretti: Master Sculptor and Father of Vulcan, the list contains no certain mention of the present lot, but includes some eighteen pieces which were unknown to Mercer but have come to light as a result of Ms. Fowler's research. As a catalogue raisonné, it is thus something of a work-in-progress. There are several pieces mentioned which relate to the present lot and confirm Moretti's interest in the subject matter: "Little Bacchante" (no. 207), a laughing child made in 1892; "Baby Neptune Fountain" (no. 229), dated 1923 and described as a "charming fountain of a plump baby cuddled in the upper part of a shell grasping a trident looking at the large crab"; and "Boy on Turtle" (no. 232), which Moretti made during the last years of his life and depicts a child wrestling with two fishes, one in each arm. Mercer concludes the list with several pieces modeled by Moretti "but never made in permanent form." Mentioned is "Man Strangling Serpent" (no. 282), dated pre-1904 but with no description offered. This suggests an attempted interpretation of the Laocoön, or perhaps Mercer has miscatalogued a "Child Strangling Serpents" and mistakenly assumed it had never been completed "in permanent form."