Medardo Rosso

Medardo Rosso
Self-Portrait in the Studio on the Boulevard des Batignolles, post 1901
Born	(1858-06-21)21 June 1858 Turin, Italy
Died	31 March 1928(1928-03-31) (aged 68) Milan, Italy
Nationality	Italian, French (naturalized 1902)
Known for	Sculpture, Photography
Patron(s)	Henri Rouart, Etha Fles

Medardo Rosso (Italian: [meˈdardo ˈrosso]; 21 June 1858, Turin, Italy – 31 March 1928, Milan) was an Italian sculptor. He is considered, like his contemporary and admirer Auguste Rodin, to be an artist working in a post-Impressionist style.

Rosso was born in Turin, where his father worked as a railway station inspector, and the family moved to Milan when Rosso was twelve. At the age of 24, after a spell in the army, Rosso enrolled at the Brera Academy, from which he would soon be expelled after punching a student who refused to sign a petition that Rosso had circulated demanding that live models and body parts be used for the drawing classes, which was a standard practice in Italian academies at the time. In his 1889 almanac of living artists, Angelo de Gubernatis offered a romanticized portrait of Rosso's early years as an artist:

(He) rebelled at each school, with each method, with each Academy, abhoring anything that smacked of trade, of artifice, soon found himself alone, without support, without master, without counselors, and with a bunch of captive and envious colleagues who tripped him, when he tried his way and to demonstrate his abilities, his ingenuity. But the Biblical saying "Go alone!" did not frighten him, even in those long daily vigils struggling with a whole system which for many years had triumphed, despite the strong supporters of this and that opponent, he felt his strength increase, developed his talent, he conceived a vast new artistic horizon never before seen, and began to work and hold it to the test.

Starting in 1881 in Milan, Rosso began producing bronze busts and figures that reflected largely Realist influences, with works such as The Hooligan (1882) and Kiss Under the Lamppost (1882). Rosso's style began to change after 1882, possibly due to the discovery of Impressionism, and some of his first works during this period, including Portinaia (Concierge) (1883–84) and Carne altrui (Flesh of Others) (1883–84) begin to "suggest a loss of detail in favor of sketchy modeling, flattened planes, and gently modulated surfaces to soften the play of light and shadow." Rosso never made preparatory drawings for his sculptures, opting instead to work directly with the clay from which he would then make a working model in plaster, which was then used to created the negative mold into which he would cast in bronze using the cire perdue method, and he also cast works in plaster, and, much later, wax with a plaster interior. Some art historians have suggested that Rosso traveled to Paris in 1884 and worked in the studio of sculptor Jules Dalou, but no historical record has corroborated this. In Milan, Rosso continued to cast small-scale works throughout the mid-1880s, in addition to a series of entries for public monuments, such as a funeral monument to the critic Filippo Filippi.