A Town Full of Sculpture

The butcher outside his shop in Spoleto, Italy, leans against an ancient Roman wall topped by an abstract angel of golden bronze. Women in rusty black shawls on their way to Mass at the Church of San Domenico step gingerly past a giant iron spider. Families sipping Campari in a sidewalk cafe ponder a guitar cut from steel and mounted on a flatcar. All over town, modern sculptures of bronze and steel and iron loom over fountains, peer from alleys (see color}. Now that the initial shock is wearing off, the Spoletani are getting used to and even beginning to like what they see, and art lovers from outside are ecstatic.

Beginning five years ago, the ancient town in the green Umbrian hills of central Italy has been the annual host of Gian Carlo Menotti's vaunted Festival of Two Worlds. Primarily a cultural Chautauqua of contemporary music and modern drama, the festival seemed to need another dimension. Last year Giovanni Carandente, ebullient gadfly in Italy's slow-moving museum bureaucracy, and champion of Italian sculptors in the international art markets, met Menotti and suggested a sculpture exhibition in the streets of the town.

Sorcerer's Apprentice. Enthusiast Menotti agreed, and Carandente went to work. Britain's Henry Moore promised to lend his totemlike Glenkiln Cross and a bronze Reclining Figure. Top Italian sculptors like Manzu and Marini were easily persuaded to lend important pieces.

Invitations went out to leading sculptors around the world to exhibit their work--not for prizes, but for the sheer satisfaction of showing them to a large audience out-of-doors, as ornaments for a beautiful town. Contributions came from Picasso, Arp, Armitage, Giacometti, Butler and dozens of others.

But Carandente also wanted sculpture created expressly for Spoleto, and sought help from Italsider, Italy's state-controlled steelmaker. Italsider agreed to provide big ironworking shops for ten sculptors (three Americans, one Englishman, six Italians) --an invitation that appealed most of all to David Smith, one of the U.S.'s most active artist-welders.

Three days after Smith arrived at Italsider's Voltri mill near Genoa, Carandente telephoned to find out how he was doing, was stunned to learn that Smith had already turned out six pieces. How could the festival display six Smiths when it was showing only two Moores? Unperturbed, Smith went back to work, planning to finish four more by the end of the week. Menotti was incredulous, Carandente was appalled. After a few days they phoned Smith again, were jolted to hear him announce that there were now 16 pieces cooling in the mill.

Feeling like the sorcerer's apprentice, Carandente desperately sought to find some place for the gusher of art he had tapped. Finally he hit upon a ist century Roman amphitheater near Spoleto's Piazza della Liberta. A few days before the Festival of Two Worlds opened, an enormous truck lumbered into town from the Voltri mill groaning with no fewer than 25 pieces by David Smith.

Lasting Effect. The show closes at the end of August, but a number of souvenirs will remain in Spoleto as a permanent reminder of the summer when 106 works by 52 sculptors enlivened its streets and piazzas. David Smith has donated a circle pierced by a swirling, wavelike bar, supported by a pair of pincers ("It has more grace than most of my work, so I thought it belonged there"); Lynn Chadwick's batlike, three-legged Stranger III will remain on the ramp leading up from the duomo; Nino Franchini's leaping spire of torn steel will stay on the spot where it was made, a cleft between two ancient houses.

Still under construction this week is the piece that caps the whole show: Alexander Calder's permanent contribution.

After being asked to make a mobile, the sculptor sent detailed sketches with a note saying, "I am sending you a stabile." Calder's "stabile" consists of an arch 59 ft. high and 49 ft. wide, weighing 30 tons and looming over the town's northern entrance. It rates the title of largest piece of modern metal sculpture in the world.

When welding is complete, it could cost more to remove than it cost to make. So it, too, will stay in Spoleto.

It seems likely that the Spoleto show will have a lasting effect. It has proved once and for all to Italians that there is something more interesting to look at in the way of outdoor sculpture than the pompous equestrian statues of Victor Emmanuel II, which clutter up many of their piazzas. The naked use of common industrial methods to produce sculpture has stripped away much of the mystery of the craft, has humanized what had been before a less than generally appreciated art form. Last week an ironmonger who had been hired to fasten steel straps around the bases of several statues said confidently: "I think I'll make some sculptures myself."

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