Masters of Stone

The five Piccirilli brothers of The Bronx are the world's greatest team of sculptors. But, like the Pisani of the 13th Century, they prefer to think of themselves as "masters of stone." As such, they make most of their money anonymously converting into their own Italian marble the clay and plaster models of less handy and sometimes more famed U. S. sculptors. Last week, for probably the first time in Piccirilli history, someone else had the job of executing work by a Piccirilli.

For a year Brother Attilio worked on the design, first in clay, then in plaster, for the world's biggest sculptural glass panel, to go over the door of the Italian Building in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. The panel, 10 ft. by 16 ft., took seven tons of clay, showed one huge figure shoveling. The Piccirillis are not glass workers. The model went to the Corning Glass Works for casting. Corning divided the panel into 45 sections to be joined by transparent cement, used a so-called "poetic" Pyrex glass filled with air bubbles. Last week Corning had finished the Italian Building panel, promised delivery next month.

The Piccirillis are the Bronx climax of a distinguished family of Tuscans who, originally from Spain, worked in stone for two centuries around Carrara and Massa between the mountains and the sea, fought with Garibaldi and emigrated to Manhattan in 1888.

The father was a sculptor. All six of his sons followed his example: Ferucchio, now 73 and back in Italy; Furio, 71, specialist in animal figures; Tommaso, 69, summering last week at Far Rockaway, L. I.; Attilio, 67, foremost sculptor of the brothers; Horatio, 65, another animal specialist; Guitilio, 63, marble carver, critic and the firm's businessman. All but Ferucchio are now U. S. citizens.

Forty-five years ago Father Piccirilli moved from central Manhattan to The Bronx, built a red brick house across several city lots with a large carriage door through which to haul out big sculptures. His sons he sent back to Italy one by one to study at Rome's Accademia San Luca. U. S. sculptors presently found that the Piccirillis could finish their works in marble better than they could themselves. Through the years the six brothers faithfully executed such work by other sculptors as Frederick MacMonnies' Civic Virtue in Manhattan, Daniel Chester French's great Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., and Robert Aitken's pediment for the west portico of the brand new Supreme Court Building in Washington, into which Sculptor Aitken put the faces of Chief Justice Hughes, William Howard Taft, John Marshall (as a boy), Architect Cass Gilbert and himself. The brothers' business boomed. The red brick house grew to a 20-room catacomb of high-ceilinged workshops, spare of furniture, full of great lumps of stone, clay, plaster. One piece, a huge statue of James Monroe, ordered and paid for by a Venezuelan President who lost his job unexpectedly, stood around for 30 years until the Piccirillis gave it to the State of Virginia. On another piece the Christian Science Church paid 20 years' storage charges.

Each of the five Bronx brothers works on his own jobs in the Bronx house. Only on big jobs do they work together. Only Attilio, long separated from his wife, now lives in the house. The other brothers arrive early in the morning. Work begins with pointing-machines, chisels, mallets, electric drills and the casting foundry. As many as 100 men are sometimes employed. In old clothes and square paper caps, the five brothers hammer and laugh, shout and sing arias from opera. At noon Attilio or a "Tuscan gentlewoman" named Clementina cooks the roast, spaghetti or chicken, uncorks the Vesuvian wine and the five & guests sit down for a noisy, two-hour meal. Horatio usually washes the dishes afterward. All talk well, laugh easily. Frequent guests at these Renaissance meals are New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia who calls Attilio "Uncle Peach" and John D. Rockefeller Jr. whom "Uncle Peach" calls Mr. Rockefeller.

Mr. Rockefeller's Center has had great ructions with such modernist artists as Diego Rivera (TIME, May 22, 1933 et seq.). The classical Piccirillis are precisely after the Rockefeller heart.

Attilio is a heavy, ruddy, boisterous, rich-voiced Italian with a grey brush mustache, tousled hair and oyster-shaped ears. His relations with people are whimsical and kindly. He rises at 6 o'clock, does the marketing, eats but once a day, at the great noon banquet. He has taught and housed many an impoverished art student, helped found Manhattan's charitable Leonardo da Vinci School of Art where he still teaches. He now has but one protegee, a vivid little 23-year-old named Vivian Lush who helped him work on the Rockefeller Center panel. For her he predicts a great future.

Though the Piccirillis usually work together as "stone-masters," Attilio stands head and shoulders above his brothers as an individual artist. A classical conformist, he is a master of the human form. His figures have an impressive, if somewhat posed, nobility, and they are simply conceived and carried out. He designed Manhattan's imposing Maine Monument at Columbus Circle, its Firemen's Memorial on Riverside Drive, notable for its expressive woman & child group. One of his best works is the pediment on the Frick house in Manhattan, a poetic and satisfying solution of the problem of putting a man and a tree into a segment space. Other fine work: The Bronx's Columbus Monument, Albany's Mother's Monument, Richmond, Va.'s bust of Thomas Jefferson.

Attilio's first design for the Italian Building's glass panel Mr. Rockefeller thought a shade "too servile." An honest workman, Attilio redesigned it, eliminating two shoveling workmen and putting in the motto in Italian, "Art is Labor, Labor is Art."

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