THE PORTRAITS OF ERCOLE VILLA

by Ferzini Frans (2002) © Marmor, Verona, Giorgio Zusi Editore, n.77, pp. 26-29 [original title: La ritrattistica di Ercole Villa]

Born in Milan 16th January 1827, Ercole Villa travelled to Vercelli in 1855 on the request of architec Dusnasi to decorate the tympanum of the present-day High School in Via Carducci.

His training in Milan was extremely precocious thanks to his assiduous attendance of the Brera Academy and, particularly, sculptor Benedetto Cacciari, his academic teacher, who welcomed him into his own studio where for many years projects were developed for the Savoy royal house. After the five-day revolt in 1848, Villa moved to Turin and attended the Albertina Academy where the neo-classic environment of Gaggini and Bogliani proved to be extremely congenial for the Milanese sculptor. In 1854, he exhibited a “putto lain on a cushion” at the Society of Fine Arts.

It was in any case in Vercelli that he achieved the peak of success after having sculpted this tympanum, and even more so after having carved four of the twelve statues of the Apostles installed in 1860 to crown the atrium by Alfieri of Vercelli Cathedral. These works gained him such fame that he shortly earned commissions from private patrons, such as the Gattinara family, which as early as 1857 requested a funerary monument for Feliciano in Biliemme cemetery (Vercelli). This meek angel abandons every neo-classic symmetry to open out toward Romanticism.

In more than fifty years of activity, Villa populated the city of Vercelli a whole series of commemorative busts, funeray monuments and important public monuments. Yet it was in portraits for the Holy Arts that his stylistic-cultural development is most evident in the execution of apparently more humble works in any case commissioned by richer and aristocratic patron.

Later on, he embraced more emphatic realism, as explained in an essay by Giovacchino de Agostini published in 1869. By no means disguising his admiration for Vela and Marocchetti rather than Canova and Sangiorgio, De Agostini praised Villa's romantic character and his technique in portraying the female subjects of the times without allowing the truth of such portraiture to modify the austere character of the subject. It seems that an apparent contrast between lightness and gravity became a constant style, an obsessive search into the portraits expected in the Holy Arts.

A similar contrast also characterises the angelic figures of the two Tavallini tombs: one angel recalling the ancient figure of Nike embodies a kind of Mercurial transmutation: a finger of the right hand raised from an outstretched, twisted arm indicates the “Way”, almost like a Mercury by Giambologna, while the delicate wings form a geometrical counterpoint, a trembling asymmetry of the difficult detachment from material. What a contrast with the nearby bust by Antonio Tavallini (1181) and its intense, austere and severe hints of human suffering despite their pride and dignity.

Dozens of busts were made in the second half of the century, tracking the career of the sculptor and his adaptation to the formal modules in vogue in the different decades.

The simplified architectural and geometrical forms of his early works gave way to restrained realism characterised by delicate idealism, distant, severe and cogent gazes towards points beyond the horizon. As in the Beglia bust (1866), where a ceremonial, strutting approach by no means prevents out-of-the-ordinary elegance, while the flowing curls and gestures equally do not allow the face to betray a sensual severity and an intense material “detachment”.

In the late 1880s, his realism turned into a kind of precious virtuosity throughout complacent expression of facial features and related facets, such as lace, drapery pearls and ribbons. At times, personalities are almost caught by surprise in odd moments with detached involvement during social life, as in a second bust of Beglia dated 1881 where a mere gesture animates the static, impassable, delicate, liquid and imperturbable melancholy of the bust. The two Beglia busts were restored recently (September 2001) and provide an excellent comparison between two moments in Villa's career, accentuated by the contrast between statuary marble and the background in Belgian Black stone of the epigraphic slabs and the two small grooved columns in Bardiglio that thrust upwards the two busts in a virtual, light manner.

The style of his late period is especially characterised by the bust of Laura Scappa (1885). The shoulders wrapped in a shawl rich with draped lace, pearls and crochet-work almost seem to sustain the weight of the heavy fabric rising in a mass of ribbons to a suffocating collar from which the head, with emphatic features, betrays silent suffering well-disguised by aloof awareness. The eyes and their momentary brightness go beyond every setting in their intense idealism. Light as the contradiction of the opulent density of the body.