We know that the first meeting between Gemito and Ricci took place around 1923, when the young man was just over fifteen years old and his acquaintance with the master must have had a significant impact on his training. Paolo Ricci tells verbatim that he met Gemito in 1924. Our sculpture therefore validates a relationship already consolidated over time until Gemito’s death in 1929, significantly marking a relationship of esteem and affection between the two, protagonists of different generations, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in a very challenging transition phase in the history of Italy, because it was tested by the epilogue of the Great War. It was in those years, between 1925 and 1926, that the young man began to feed on an ardent passion for art, however not sparing himself in trying the study of disciplines new ideas, from urban planning to architecture to psychoanalysis, which led him to attend alternative, liberal and anti-fascist circles, which then met around 1929, in the so-called Manifesto dell’ Unione Distruttivisti Attivisti (UDI), made up of intellectuals such as Carlo Bernari and Guglielmo Peirce .

Ricci nurtured a real veneration for his master Gemito. In a 1946 article, recalling Gemito’s madness and the magic of their first meeting, he mentions an assistant engraver, named Renato, who used to accompany the master on his arm to physically support him in the balance of his limping gait. The first meeting was inside a foundry, to be identified with the Fonderia Lagan, near the Bartolini hotel, on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The master used to go there to refine his metal works, giving the last coat of chisel with the raspino and it was Gemito who addressed the boy with determination for a warning that left its mark in his memory: “(...) Guys. If you want to be a sculptor, remember everything you see (you live) and not only the pretty things! was actually bewitched, and I followed his movements, the expressions of his highly mobile mask with spasmodic interest, despite a painful tingling in my knees due to the uncomfortable position in which / was forced to remain so as not to show myself weaker, very young, than the great old man (...)”.

Our work falls within the third and final phase of works with new subjects created by the artist, still unknown to Gemito scholars, and at least little surveyed above all as regards to plastic production. Gemito completely overcame the psychic sufferings that had isolated him from the outside world for about a decade and, from the mid-1920s on, he returned to working hard for clients in Naples, Rome, and Paris. In August 1924 he was engaged in the preparation of an exhibition in Paris and lived in the French capital, staying at the Hotel Favart and working with his assistant, Salvatore Pavone, to comply with the requests of various Italian and foreign buyers including an American woman who commissioned a work in silver. As original plastic products, two masterpieces also date back to 1926, The Portrait of Raffaele Viviani (Naples, Museo di San Martino) in terracotta and the bronze sculpture of the Sibyl or The Witch (private collection) which takes part in an exhibition at the Gallery Pesaro in Milan, curated by Salvatore di Giacomo.

A full fact sheet is available on request.