Il ragazzo con i gabbiani

A bronze boy strides forward with gulls wheeling around him. Pericle Fazzini cast the figure in 1986 from a wooden original carved during the war years, transforming the lightness of the original into bronze.

Why it matters

Grottammare was the birthplace of the twentieth-century Italian sculptor Pericle Fazzini, and this bronze is a public work by him. Fazzini executed the cast in 1986, taking as his model an original in carved wood that he had made between 1940 and 1944 — so the figure carries forty years of an artist's life inside it: the young carver of the wartime years and the old master returning to his own idea.

A boy runs into the wind with seagulls about him, connecting the sculpture's subject with its coastal setting. The poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, a friend of Fazzini, called him the sculptor of the wind, a phrase that reflects the lightness of this work.

What to notice

The boy's stride gives the composition its direction, while the gulls act as counterweights: their wings open the silhouette in several directions, changing the sculpture's appearance from different viewpoints. The bronze retains the faceted, hand-carved surface of its wooden original, from which the cast was made.

The figure stands on the seashore near the cliff, marking a transition between the town and open coast. Bronze exposed to sea wind and salt develops a patina as part of its outdoor life.

Context and history

The story of the sculpture is the story of its maker. Born in Grottammare on 4 May 1913 into a family of wood artisans, Fazzini learned furniture carving as a child, and it was the Grottammare poet Mario Rivosecchi — honoured with a portrait bust — who enabled his move to study in Rome. From his studio in Rome's Via Margutta, opened in 1938, Fazzini built a career that ran through the Venice Biennale and exhibitions abroad, and culminated in the Resurrezione begun in 1970 and inaugurated in 1977: the colossal bronze for the Vatican's papal audience hall. He died in Rome on 4 December 1987, mourned as one of the greatest sculptors of the Novecento.

The boy with his gulls represents both ends of that career: an idea from the 1940s, cast in the last years of the sculptor's life and placed in the town where he was born. Fazzini's Grottammare works include the Metamorfosi, the Medaglia di Dante, the Via Crucis at Sant'Agostino, and works held at the Torrione museum and the MIC.