Antonio Sciortino

Biography

In 1907 a bronze group of three street urchins was brought to Malta. The sculptor had made it in Rome three years earlier, inspired by “Les Misérables”: in Hugo’s novel such children roam Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. The original is now in MUŻA in Valletta, and a replica stands in the Upper Barrakka Gardens.

Antonio Sciortino was born on 25 January 1879 in Żebbuġ, Malta. From childhood he drew and modelled, and, as is written of him, his aunt Vittorina encouraged this passion. At the Valletta School of Arts he spent two years studying drawing under the painter Lazzaro Pisani and modelling under Vincenzo Cardona. The Strickland family helped him obtain a government scholarship through the Malta Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and at twenty-two he left for Rome.

At the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Rome he spent two years studying architecture and civil engineering. He also attended evening classes at the British Academy and at a school of decorative arts attached to the Museo Artistico Tecnologico. In 1902 he received his diploma with distinction and opened a studio at 33 Via Margutta. There he resolved to free himself from imitative tradition. “Il filosofo” (1902) won him a name as an original sculptor and the attention of critics; together with “Testa di vecchio” it was shown at the Promotrice exhibition in Rome. In “Studio di donna” (1904) he moved away from the way French sculptors of the time usually treated the female figure and turned to Greek models.

In 1905 he won the competition for a monument to Sir Adrian Dingli; it was unveiled in April 1907 in Floriana in the presence of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. A commission followed for “Il lavoratore” (The Worker), for the Casa del Popolo in Rome. In 1909 his “Irredentism”, an allegory of Italy bearing a quotation from Dante’s “Inferno”, was shown in Venice. The critic Ettore Cozzani called the conception a “weird idea in not a bad form”. “Germinando un’idea” and “Remorse”, made by 1910, clearly show the mark of Rodin. In Paris Sciortino modelled a bust of Leo Tecktonius, an American composer and pianist. Rodin liked the bust, asked for a model for himself and met the sculptor, and the two remained friends from then on.

In 1911 Sciortino became director of the British Academy of Arts in Rome and held the post for twenty-five years. That same year he entered the international competition for a monument to Emperor Alexander II of Russia: his design and model won first prize, but the prize was not awarded, for a formal reason. Tsar Nicholas II, it is said, bought the design. In 1913 he won the competition for a monument to the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko: the granite and bronze figure, 7.5 metres high, showed the poet in Ukrainian dress, seated on a tree trunk, and the pedestal carried a group representing the people of Ukraine. The monument was never built.

In 1914 he wanted to join the Royal Engineers, but on the advice of Lord Grenfell, a former governor of Malta, he stayed in Rome and took up a memorial to the First World War. For three years he planned and modelled the “Temple of the British Empire to the Unknown Hero”; the clay model at a scale of 1:200 survives. It is said that the very idea of a memorial to the Unknown Soldier originated with the Maltese sculptor; that is hard to verify. For the International Eucharistic Congress of 1913 he made “Christ the King”: a bronze figure 3.5 metres high on a granite pedestal, unveiled in Floriana on 30 December 1917 at a ceremony attended by about forty thousand people. At the foot, a kneeling figure of Malta bows her head.

In 1922 he examined the Isleworth Mona Lisa and wrote that the picture was beautiful and perfectly preserved, but in his opinion belonged to the school of Leonardo.

He took on a monument to Chekhov for Rostov-on-Don at the request of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; the plaster draft was finished in 1923, but the work was never realized in bronze because of the turmoil in Russia after Lenin’s death. Today the plaster stands in the courtyard of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta. In 1924–1927 Sciortino made “Rhythmi Vitae”, regarded as one of his best works in bronze and shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. At this time he also made a bust of Queen Carmen Sylva of Romania and a monument to the proclamation of the Republic in Brazil. On 8 May 1927 the Great Siege Monument was unveiled in Valletta, opposite the former Auberge d’Auvergne: three figures represent courage, faith and civilization. In 1929 his design for an equestrian monument to Simón Bolívar took second place.

From 1931 to 1936 he prepared twenty-one sculptures in plaster, bronze and marble for an exhibition planned by the American Art Commission: “Lindbergh on Eagle”, “Arab Horses”, “Speed”, “Dangerous Sport” and others. The exhibition did not take place, because of the death of the commission’s chairman, Frank Pedry, the economic recession in the United States and international events. Sciortino kept his British citizenship, although he was offered Italian.

In 1936 the British Academy in Rome closed because of the political conflict over the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Sciortino resigned and returned to Malta, where on 3 May 1937 he was appointed curator and inspector of fine arts at the museum. In his last years he worked to save Maltese cultural heritage from the consequences of the Second World War. His last work was the monument to Lord Gerald Strickland, unveiled in 1945 in the Upper Barrakka Gardens. Sciortino died in Valletta on 10 August 1947 and bequeathed to the nation his collection of plaster casts and drawings, now held at MUŻA.