Gerald Bugeja:
The Lost Album, Antonio Sciortino
Kite Group, 2015.

The discovery of a large album of photographs, mostly of works by Antonio Sciortino, counts as a major breakthrough in our understanding of the artist and of his art.

The only Maltese sculptor to have acquired an international reputation since Melchiorre Cafà in the seicento, Sciortino is hardly neglected or under-promoted, but we are still far from knowing enough about him, his life and his achievements.

The Sciortino album, the main focus of the book Antonio Sciortino. The Lost Album, has many claims to recognition: it lifts the veil of oblivion off a number of Sciortino’s works, hitherto unknown and unrecorded.

The reader discovers important works by the sculptor which had been forgotten – his documented oeuvre is now richer than ever before. The artist spent most of his creative life in early 20th-century Rome, a hotbed of artistic energies (if not innovation), where a large number of Italian and foreign artists crowded.

Sciortino, though certainly not a sculptor at the tail-end, was only one of the elite many, and systematic evidence of his artistic life is not always easy to come by. This album, meticulously studied by Bugeja, fills a void of the knowledge necessary to evaluate the artist more holistically, and does it remarkably, with lingering love.

Plaster model of half-length portrait of Bishop Pietro Pace. The bronze version of the bust of Mgr Pace is placed on a high plinth in the Gozo Cathedral.

But the rediscovered album boasts another outstanding merit. Often enough, Sciortino made use of the services of a most skillful photographer or photographers. Some of the images between the album’s covers are quite pedestrian, shot by amateurs, possibly Sciortino himself.

But others are by a professional who knew everything about how to make light model the form; how to encourage light to caress the shapes the sculptor had created; how to allow those forms to glow from the inside. How to make a flat, two-dimensional image, acquire profundity. It is a pity the photographer remains anonymous. Antonio Sciortino, The Lost Album is as much a memorial to the sculptor as it is to the photographer of some of the images in it.

Sciortino’s artistic profile is progressively acquiring a sharper focus. Many studies have contributed to define what influenced him, his patronage, his teaching, his milieu, where he was a pioneer, where he was a follower.

It is the compass of his life cycle which is still mostly unclear: his political ideals, his emotional impulses, his social interactions. All these, Sciortino strove hard to fade off the screen. About his emotional turbulences and calms, if he suffered any at all, we know absolutely nothing.

This album fills a void of the knowledge necessary to evaluate the artist more holistically

Even privately to his closest confidante, the art historian Vincenzo Bonello, he never lets any hints of his inner life or conflicts break out. The closest he came to that was the briefest postscript squeezed as an afterthought on the margin of a letter from Rome: “I forgot to tell you I got engaged to a young Scottish girl”. The engagement did not last long. His silence lasts an eternity.

Detailed artistic impression showing the exterior side view of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, in pencil, ink and water colour.

Even Sciortino’s political orientations are glossed over by all biographers – including the present book. He is routinely labelled an ‘anglophile’, that is one who worshipped the British owners of Malta, one who prided himself being a servant in his own home.

Well, hardly. What we know of the early Sciortino points in the opposite direction. In 1901 he was actually a founder-member of the nationalist organization La Giovine Malta, the intellectual prop of the patriotic movement in Malta. He spoke Italian fluently and limped grotesquely in English. He translated L’Irredentismo, an extreme concept of a Greater Italy rejected by moderate patriots in Malta, into a vibrant piece of sculpture.

That he eventually advertised himself as a switcher and made it a point to root for the colonial, imperialist connection, is undoubted, if perhaps sad. The switch paid lavishly. But he never told anyone what his volte-face cost in terms of self-respect.

This album helps to identify the artistic influences that moulded Sciortino. All great artists, dead or alive, influence each other – there is no escaping that the cross-fertilisation of abilities has been one of the decisive propellants of important art.

Plaster model of Monument of the Lighthouse.

This does not make Sciortino, or any other artist who falls under the spell of overwhelming genius, a plagiarist. A truly creative artist assimilates foreign influence, digests it and re-proposes it, singing it with his own voice, infusing it with his own soul. There is always his own bold fingerprint.

So it is with Sciortino. Like many, he grew under the shadow of Rodin, but he is no way an imitator of Rodin. I can see some Leonardo Bistolfi, Ivan Mestrovic, Davide Calandra, Ladislav Saloun, (some Medardo Rosso, perhaps?) in different works by Sciortino. Sometimes, there are even hints of Adolfo Wildt at his less enigmatic, but he still remains the authentic, hyper-personalised Sciortino nonetheless.

It is challenging that he considered himself an avant-garde sculptor – he wanted obstinately to brand himself and for others to see him, as “the most modern artist” of his times. And he claims, rather bafflingly, that even the leading futurist Giacomo Balla agreed: “I don’t know if you are aware that today I am considered the most modern artist by many, among them Brasini and Balla. I do modern art following my vision,” he wrote to Vincenzo Bonello on December 23, 1932.

Plastiline equestrian monument to Maximo Gomez, Major General in the Ten Years’ War (1868- 1878) and Cuba’s military commander in the country’s war of Independence (1895-1898).

For most of his early creative life, Sciortino chose Rome as his adopted home, and that was already a far wider horizon than Żebbuġ. Admittedly, Rome in Edwardian times was no longer the artistic centre of gravity, the way the Rome of the papacy had been before the French Revolution. Its primacy had, by then, given way to Paris.

But Rome still pulsed considerably and was a good place to settle in not to be too far from the heart of the creative body. Thankfully, even the advent of fascism in Italy in the early 1920s did not have a totally lethal effect on art, the way Nazism had in Hitler’s Germany and Communism in Stalin’s Russia. Rome was still an alternative centre for modern, though evidently less revolutionary, less transgressive art.

And Sciortino kept himself busy, frequenting the international circuit. He took part in a number of important international contests and even succeeded in winning some. His constant struggle against international competition made him alert to what was going on in the world of the plastic arts around him and that challenge constantly sharpened and enriched his sensibilities.

He drifted slowly from the traditional academia to art nouveau, which then subtly morphed into an amalgam of modernism and art deco. What is obvious is that he did not shift shallowly from fashion to fashion, merely to sustain his ambition to be modern; he put all the courage of his convictions and all the resources of his consummate skill, in every new exploration.

He grew under the shadow of Rodin, but he is no way an imitator of Rodin

Bugeja has worked on an exhaustive analysis of all the images contained in the album. He has placed each of them in their artistic and historical context, finding new insights in those works we already knew about and introducing into Sciortino’s oeuvre some wholly new sculptures and insights, which he has unearthed though the examination of the newly-discovered album. Sciortino’s artistic stature now appears more gigantic as a result. For him, the pursuit of art was a religion unto itself. Those who did not believe as intensely as he did, he rejected and locked out of his magic circle.

Plastiline model of the full-length portrait of an unidentified soldier.

If only for the substantial number of photographs of so-far unknown or lost works by Sciortino, this book would have been invaluable. But it is much more than that. Even when it comes to works already known, it throws light on their creative process, on variants, on pentimenti. It is an ongoing diary of intuitions, working hypothesis, creation in progress. Our knowledge and critical appreciation of Sciortino would have been far flatter without it.

To complement the main research, this book includes three other essays on the sculptor. The first is by Theresa Vella on Sciortino the collector. Throughout his life, the artist accumulated a large and eclectic collection of works of art. This hoard-ing mania is an aspect of Sciortino’s personality that has not been at all noticed by scholars so far: what he deemed collectible, where these works figured in his world view, what they tell us about his preferences, how his collection turned into his main bargaining chip with the British authorities.

Sandro Debono has focused his critical attention on the Sciortino collection at the National Museum of Fine arts and the drawings and designs of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier (60 drawings and sketches published for the first time). I, too, have contributed an essay on an unknown episode in Sciortino’s life, when his artistic abilities and integrity were savaged by a failed former student of his. I have also compiled another study on Sciortino’s unpublished correspondence with Vincenzo Bonello, which will be printed in a forthcoming festschrift in honour of professor Mario Buhagiar.

It is not as if Malta has showcased scores of artists of international stature. Sciortino would count as one of the few, the very few, whose name has some resonance in the world art scene. We owe it to our collective sense of pride, if not to his memory, to discover his insights and advertise his genius. That will canonise him and fortify us. I believe the author has done just that.