Quo Vadis? Giuseppe Moretti's Movable Pittsburgh Monuments

I keep thinking about that Giuseppe Moretti sculpture that was removed from Oakland amidst public hullabaloo and a recommendation of the city's Art Commission.

You know, this one.

Birmingham Public Library, 617.1.120, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

Wait, you thought I meant this one?

You're forgiven for the mistake, given that Giuseppe Moretti's 118 year old Stephen Foster memorial has finally been uncermoniously hauled away on the back of a flat-bed truck. No, it isn't on its way to becoming a traveling public art installation (Although the PPG's Christopher Huffaker wondered if this could maybe become a thing with other statues. And, you know, I think there's merit to that idea).

After decades of sporadic protests, and one year of intense debate, Moretti's Foster was removed to a temporary Public Works storage facility. As of this writing its next display place is still unknown.

Moretti's seen it all before from the Great Beyond. His art gets around. Even the Foster piece originally began its days as a public sculpture in Highland Park, relocated to a prominent spot in Oakland after repeated vandalism at its more isolated location.


Giuseppe Moretti, Pittsburgh's Sculptor

Pittsburg Press, 11 September 1900 at the time of the Foster memorial dedication

Born in 1857 in Siena Italy, Giuseppe Moretti was our go-to civic sculptor during Pittsburgh's City Beautiful period. His works graced many pre-WWI era public spaces. In addition to the Stephen Foster memorial, the list of Moretti monuments is long -- and mostly East End-ish. Moretti created the Highland and Stanton entrances to Highland Park (I wrote about his Horse Tamers in detail HERE) and the four panthers on either end of the Panther Hollow Bridge. At Schenley Park, his legacy includes a likeness of the 'Father of Pittsburgh's Parks' Edward Manning Bigelow, and a statue of goddess of health Hygeia for a WWI physician memorial.

Formerly in Oakland, the twin bronze Sphinxes that stood sentinel outside the late lamented Syria Mosque were relocated to Harmar Township by the Shriners when that facility met the wrecking ball.

Apparently long gone is a 10,000 pound Carrara marble drinking fountain that Moretti created for Highland Park in 1902 called Echo. It sat atop the lower Bunker Hill steps across from St. Clair, and consisted of a granite base "....surmounted by the recumbent figure of a child with its head resting in a listening attitude upon an enormous sea shell, from the interior of which the water rushes forth."

Moretti's 'Echo' drinking fountain, Highland Park, c. 1922
Pittsburgh City Photographers Collection
Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

Moretti also crafted elaborate honor roll tablets for East Liberty Presbyterian, Shadyside Presbyterian, and Oakland's First Unitarian churches; safety trophies for Carnegie Steel plants; and various honorary tablets commissioned for local fraternities, cemeteries, and schools.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 21 January 1923

He even created a medallion for the SS Pittsburgh of the White Star line. It looks intensely cool and would occupy pride of place in my family room if someone wants to dredge it out of the Gulf of Athens for me:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 May 1923

Moretti also completed pieces elsewhere in the United States. His most famous work, a colossal cast iron statue of Vulcan, towers above Birmingham Alabama to this day. But impressive on a smaller scale--and closer to Pittsburgh--is his heroic 10-foot-tall Soldiers Memorial in Bellevue’s Bayne Park.

Flush with income from his many commissions, Moretti built a home and atelier in 1916 for $30,000 at 4029 Bigelow Bvd on a triangular lot at the corner of Centre Avenue. Much altered, the building still houses works of marble and granite on a far smaller scale as the headquarters for The Tile Collection.

Birmingham Public Library, 617.23e, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

When constructed by the Schenley Farms Company, it was described as a cream-colored brick and white Alabama marble building crowned with two gilded figures. The figures are indistinct in this photo, but they look like nudes wrestling with a globe. Moretti would occupy this building for only a few years before leaving Pittsburgh in 1924 for cleaner air, better light, and his favored Sylacauga marble deposits in Alabama.

Quo Vadis

According to Pittsburgh newspapers, Moretti began work on a sculpture in 1914 based upon characters in Henry Sienkiewicz's 1895 novel Quo Vadis (that's Latin for "Where are you going?"). It's hard to imagine when reading its heavy prose today, but this novel won a Nobel prize in literature.

Set during Nero's reign, the book chronicled the love of Lygia, a young Christian woman, and a Roman patrician named Marcus Vinicius. You'd maybe guess that the plot takes dramatic turns, and you'd be right about that, but no spoilers from me about how it all ends.

Wildly popular in its day, Sienkiewicz's novel inspired Moretti to take chisel in hand and begin carving at some Italian marble to create his own Quo Vadis, a piece he intended to be his masterwork.
 

Detail, Birmingham Public Library, 617.1.120, Collection Archives Department, Giuseppi Moretti, Papers, 1888-1981; Collection No. 617

Moretti planned to display his Quo Vadis at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (aka the World's Fair) held in San Francisco in 1915. But Moretti was a busy guy, and apparently commission after commission won out over completing Lygia, the bull and Giant Ursus. The piece languished rough and unfinished in his Pittsburgh atelier. Moretti presented the city with Quo Vadis when he left Pittsburgh in 1924, and it was on view at Phipps Conservatory for roughly ten years. Around the time of Moretti's death in 1935 "....it was just plain 'grotesque' to Superintendent of Parks Ralph E. Griswold, who had it taken out of Phipps Conservatory...and relegated to storage space."

And so Moretti's Quo Vadis "gathered dust in storage for ten years at Schenley Park," kept crated "in the storage yards back of the stables" before resurfacing in 1944 with controversy cloaking its three figures. The five ton piece returned to the public eye when a suburban couple, Mr. and Mrs. I. L. Peters, offered to move it at their expense so it could grace "....their Spanish type home on Pine Creek Hill, Perry Highway" in Wexford.

As detailed in the Post-Gazette, '"I think it's a work of art" said Mrs. Peters, a former art teacher at Colfax school, "and so does my husband, an art supervisor. Besides, I read the book Quo Vadis."' Cultural appropriation was not a concern in 1944, for the Post-Gazette further noted that "The statue is a bull, and bull-fighting is Spanish, so the statue ought to be just the thing, said Mrs. Peters."  

The Press described Mrs. Peters as someone who was "....supposed to know as much about what it takes to make a pagan sculptured group as the City Art Commission."


Isaac Lee and Margaret Hunter Peters lived in North Highland Manor, one of the earliest housing developments in the Wexford-McCandless area.  Mr. Peters was at one point an art instructor at South High, and Mrs Peters worked for the Pittsburgh Board of Education.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 September 1944

That Art Commission responded to the Peters request by evaluating Quo Vadis and declaring it to be of negligible artistic value, unfit for public display and "....obviously inferior in quality of design and workmanship." Accordingly, Pittsburgh's Art Commission passed a resolution to allow the Peters to do with Quo Vadis as they wished, so long as the city didn't have to pay for it. The committee's decision to rid the city of the piece was made on the motion of member Norwood MacGilvery, described as "of the art faculty of Carnegie Tech, and one of the leading artists of the city." He and commission chair/local architect Charles M. Stotz were described as never having heard of Giuseppe Moretti.

The local papers had a lot of fun with the sculpture, its subject matter, serious investigative journalism into the exact cattle species portrayed, and recording various opinions.

Indeed, it seems everyone had an opinion about its artistic merits. For instance, City Council President Thomas E. Kilgallen:

....turned art critic long enough to warn folks that if they want to throw the bull "it better not be this one because it's not so pretty. I went out to see the bull, which stood on a hillside behind the stables with bushes growing around it. Everyone knows a politician has no aesthetic side, but to me this bull was an uncouth, abhorrent hunk o' stone. If no Pittsburgher wants it....let those Wexford people have it.

Joseph Bailey Ellis, Carnegie Tech professor of sculpture, damned it with faint praise:

I saw the bull before they put it out of sight. It looked to me like it had been carved from imported Italian Carrara marble.  But the man who carved it didn't have enough artistic background to reach first base. He carved ably enough with his hands, but he didn't use his head.

The Mayor's PR secretary was said to have interpreted the Art Commission's assessment "....as a round-about way of saying it was 'vulgar.'"

Pittsburgh City Council wanted to sell the piece. But that's when Mayor Cornelius D. Scully stepped in.

Giuseppe & Dorothea Moretti, Geneva Mercer
Birmingham Public Library, 616.4.70b

It's all fun and games until someone tattles to the widow. Once contacted, Mrs. Moretti and former Moretti students and assistants Geneva Mercer and Mrs. Karl J. Doll begged to differ with the assessments printed in the local papers. They were "horrified" that Moretti's piece "should be incompetently and arbitrarily condemned as unartistic" given his international reputation as a sculptor. Mrs. Doll claimed the piece had been offered to her family but they had no room for it. She decried the unsophisticated public rush to judgement, which she claimed was particularly unfair given that Quo Vadis was an unfinished, rough piece:

....Mrs. Doll suffers shock and chagrin. "How could one be expected to judge something that is not finished?"

Geneva Mercer, occasionally described as a Moretti "adopted daughter", was a sculptor in her own right and former assistant to Giuseppe Moretti. She stated:

The group is a handsome arrangement of beauty in lines and masses. It is designed for outdoor display, with grass, trees, and shrubbery. It is called unfinished, but for such a display I do not see the necessity of finishing the group. So far as I know, it has never offended anyone.

Meanwhile, a citizen's group had formed and vowed to raise funds to keep the sculpture in the city, far away from the greedy grasp of pilfering suburbanites in their North Hills Spanish villas. They declared they would even mortgage their property if necessary "....to give the art a proper setting."

The Mayor, wary of arbitrarily deciding the fate of a gift by a noted artist, decided to leave the fate of Quo Vadis to Mrs Moretti. He even made a few chivalric statements to the effect that public ridicule needed to stop. But even he couldn't resist weighing in with an opinion about art, dragging on a former prize-winning Carnegie International painting by artist Peter Blume:

Mrs. Moretti is a lovely woman well up in years...and I am not going to plague her any longer by such publicity about a statue that certainly is better art than 'South of Scranton.' She has been deeply hurt by the way the figure has been ridiculed and I want to put a stop to it.

His Honor had spoken, and accordingly there was no more press ridicule of the situation (the press being a more obedient and complicit creature back then).

Mrs. Moretti let it be known that she would like Quo Vadis to go back on public display, but that didn't happen. In March 1946, the Pittsburgh Press reported that the work was still languishing

....in its traditional home in the refuse dump. It hasn't been moved despite a city-wide argument two years ago. If anything, it has sunk a little deeper into the refuse and cordwood...Councilmen, once the controversy started, wanted to forget all about it. Apparently they succeeded--nothing further was heard of plans to sell it to the highest bidder or restore it as a tribute to the sculptor's widow in Boston.

The work was decidedly the worse for the wear by this point. The Bull was hornless and tailless and "looked more like a cow."  The Giant Ursus had lost an arm, and Lygia "....to put it mildly, is bruised and battered." The new Parks director claimed he was going to have the work appraised and possibly repaired.

I've yet to find any mention about the ultimate fate of the sculpture. I live in Wexford, too, and I'm pretty sure it's not in anyone's Spanish villa out here.

In 1951 an Academy Award-nominated motion picture starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov was released based on Sienkiewicz's novel. You'd think that might have stirred local artistic memories, or at least civic consciences and consciousness. Alas, in the absence of other information, we have to assume that Quo Vadis may have met its ultimate fate on the dust heaps of art history.

In the 1920s, what appears to have been at least a partial copy of the Moretti piece showed up at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota in Florida. However, Mrs Moretti adamantly denied that her husband had a hand in its creation.


Quo Vadis, ubi iisti?

Of course, it's tempting to draw comparisons between the assumed fate of Moretti's Quo Vadis and the recent fate of his Foster memorial.

Plenty has been said in Pittsburgh (and beyond) over the years about the appropriateness of publicly displaying the Foster memorial, with various degrees of discernment applied. (Everyone has opinions and eliminatory orifices, and sometimes the contents of both bear a startling resemblance).

I recognize that history does not equal commemoration, but I also know that how we choose to commemorate frames history. Commemoration is contemporary, subject to contextual interpretation and prevailing zeitgeist. As a community, Pittsburgh has dedicated ample scholarship and a literal place to honor and recognize Foster's importance. The Moretti statue was created in 1900 with the best of intentions, funded by private donations, and well-loved in its day. But it was also a monument described then as portraying Foster "catching inspiration for his melodies from the fingers of an old darkey reclining at his feet strumming negro airs upon an old banjo."

Vandalized Foster statue, Highland Park, April 1937
Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection,
Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

The Moretti Foster piece immortalized the writing of the song 'Old Uncle Ned' (lyrics can be found HERE). Today we recognize that the portrayal of Foster's companion Old Ned or Old Black Joe (he's gone by both descriptors over the years) is a bronze representation of what Spike Lee termed a "Magical Negro." In 2018 such tropes shouldn't still resonate; to make sure they don't, informed action needs to be taken and education supported.

That's why when public opinions hit the fan about Moretti's Foster, I was fully on board believing we could do better than continue to prominently display a commemoration that caused pain. I also believed we could continue to simultaneously recognize Foster's contributions, celebrate Black music, and find a better home for this statue that would contextualize its historical framing for future understanding.

Times change, tastes change, understanding changes. Quo Vadis was originally a work of historical fiction with an underlying pro-Christian message. Moretti's portrayal of a pivotal scene from that story would have resonated for those who knew the plot, but thirty years on that message was lost in a sensational portrayal that was devoid of context. Moretti's homage had lost its meaning, much as the meaning of his homage to Foster changed with the passage of time and enlightened understanding. I do hope there is a kinder fate ahead for the Foster statue, for it deserves an appropriate home.

Marly Horses and Pittsburgh Horses

From Paris to Pittsburgh, let's talk about horses.

These horses, in Cour Marly at the Louvre Museum in Paris. 

(Credit: John Phillips)

Credit: Malcolm Craig

And these horses, at the Stanton Avenue entrance to Pittsburgh's Highland Park. 

 

Whither, Marly Withers?
These 400 year old monumental creatures reflected a love of horse culture in pre-Revolutionary France. France's Sun King Louis XIV converted an old royal hunting lodge into the Palace of Versailles over the course of four extended building campaigns. The result was spectacular, of course, but it meant the court needed a practical new home for its Royal Hunt. In 1679 architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart obliged by beginning work on Château de Marly du Roi, built on land adjacent to Versailles.

Practical, of course, is in the eyes of the beholder. Marly became to Louis and the guys what Hameau de la Reine would later be to Marie Antoinette and the gals: a place to kick back and relax in a less formal environment away from constant court scrutiny and protocol. 

Château de Marly, by Pierre-Denis Martin, 1724

 

When it was completed, Château de Marly du Roi was an extraordinary royal hunting lodge for the guys. It featured a dozen individual pavilions surrounded by exquisitely landscaped settings. The gardens were kept well-supplied with water by an enormous pump known as the Machine de Marly, which forced the water from the Seine up to a reservoir above the gardens. 

Départ de Chasse à Marly, c1720-30 by Martin le Jeune. Musée du Domaine Royal de Marly

 

Even the royal horses enjoyed the good life from their own in-ground swimming pool. That Grand Abreuvoir à Chevaux can be seen in the foreground of these paintings. 

 

Of course, such excess needed over-the-top decoration.

 Renommée

Mercure

 

French sculptor Charles Antoine Coysevox was commissioned to create a grouping of two marble equestrian subjects to decorate Château de Marly. These pieces were installed by 1701 on either side of the horse pond. The riders are Renommée (aka Fame of the King) and his companion Mercure, both astride Pegasus, and they represented Louis XIV's personal dominance in times of both peace and war.

Louis had nearly two decades to enjoy his royal hunting lodge at Marly. Upon his death in 1718, it was decided that his five year old heir and namesake would have little use for a hunting lodge. The Regency Council did find it prudent to refurbish the decrepit public Tuileries Garden for the child-king, however, and statuary was a must. So in 1719 Renommée and Mercure were saddled up and moved from Marly to the western entrance of the Tuilleries Garden park.

But when the adult Louis XV developed an interest in his great-grandfather's former hunting lodge at Marly, the place had to be spiffed up. After all, what's an in-ground equine swimming pool without massive Carrara marble horse sculptures guarding its entrance? Rather than descend on the Tuilleries to move the original equestrian statues once again, in 1739 a second group of horses was commissioned from Coysevox's nephew and former student, Nicolas Coustou.

When creating these new horse sculptures, Coustou was likely inspired by the marble Dioscuri or Horse Tamers from the Quirinal Palace in Rome, themselves 4th century copies of Greek originals. Coustou's pieces represent what the Louvre's website describes as:

...the struggle between two wild forces: an untamed horse and a naked man....The powerful, thick-necked horse shows every sign of panic and anger: rearing up, tossing its head and whinnying, with dilated eyes and nostrils, and a tousled mane. The almost invincible force of nature seems about to break free again. Wherever the spectator stands, the impression of movement, strength, and violent struggle is perceptible. A moment in time has been captured, heralding something of the Romantic works of Géricault. Indeed, Victor Hugo admired "those neighing marbles [...] prancing in a cloud of gold". Coustou claimed to have sculpted (American) Indian slaves, which explains the quiver and feathered headdress that have fallen to the ground in the struggle. The reference is approximate (one groom appears to be from the West, the other African), but the sculpture prefigures Rousseau's idea of the "noble savage" - an idea already propagated by the accounts of travelers and missionaries.                                                                                                                                                       ~ from Louvre: Marly Horses

Photos from Wikipedia Commons

 

This second set of Horse Tamers was completed by a younger brother of Nicholas, Guillaume Coustou.

Lucky for the Horse Tamers - and for us - that they were magnificently done. During the French Révolution anything that was connected with monarchy or theology was usually destroyed or vandalized by the mob. The sheer artistry of the Coysevox horses eclipsed any monarchical associations with a self-proclaimed godlike king, and that in turn allowed these sculptures to survive unscathed during a time when France destroyed much of its artistic heritage due to perceived monarchist or religious associations.

This pair of horse tamers was equally esteemed. In 1795 on the orders of the painter David, the Coustou statues were saddled up and moved to Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde), at the foot of the Champs-Elysées.

Place de la Révolution from "Paris pittoresque" circa 1842.

Alas, their old home Château de Marly du Roi did not fare as well. It was left to deteriorate, and much damage was done to the estate during the Révolution. The property was ultimately sold, and the château was leveled and sold off in bits and pieces. Napoleon I acquired the estate in 1811, and it was subsequently used by French heads of state for hunting until 2006. It has since been preserved as gracious and expansive park grounds, and vestiges of the central royal pavilion, a pond, and the main lake remain today.

Modern Marly

In 1984, both sets of Marly Horses were moved to the Richelieu wing at the Louvre to be conserved. They were replaced by cement copies at the Place de la Concorde and at Marly, and today we have the original Marly Horses to admire as museum pieces at the Louvre:

The Pittsburgh Horse-Tamers
You don't need to travel to Paris to see horse-taming sculpture. Pittsburgh has its own regional versions outside the Stanton Avenue entrance to Highland Park.

 

These sculptures may seem odd civic choices for a 19th century public park entrance in über-industrial Pittsburgh, but in context of their time the horse-tamers made sense. 

 

Writers had long contemplated such equine sculptures and what they stood for in society: 

 "....Consider these restive horses opposite careering on the self-same pedestals, from the day that Marly yielded them in 1790. They must have been the last object to catch the eye of the unfortunate king on the fatal scaffold, and the first to catch the eye of the emperor, when, after Austerlitz, he made his entry into Paris at the head of the grand armée by the Champs Elysées.....The horses of Marly! As one muses on their past, what acts, what words, what shades rise up in judgment! A hundred years of Montespan, Pompadours, Du Barrys, at Marly and two years of the avenging Reign of Terror on the Place de la Révolution! Here, for half an age, has a Babel of nations paraded, now in victory, now in idle curiosity; still those Marly horses stand where it found them. They are marble, we are animated flesh. Yet see their stern sentinelate; and do they not seem the substance, and we but a fleeting shadow?"                        ~ John Estagel, Mon Ami Perot in Bentley's Miscellany, V. 62, 1837

Granted, Pittsburgh's historical legacy was but a fleeting shadow of France's. But artists of this era often emulated and adapted the artistic mastery of earlier centuries in hopes of manifesting grandeur by association.  

 

The horse tamers had been popularly replicated in many places, so why not Pittsburgh? In 1900 when they were installed, the city was seeking a cultural veneer and accordingly chose the kinds of decorative embellishments that graced grand urban areas. 

 

The subject made sense. If horse tamer portrayals had for centuries celebrated man's mastery over wild nature, that theme certainly resonated for Pittsburghers who had witnessed a century's worth of industrial dominance. Coke and steel mills had left denuded forests quaking in submission all across Western Pennsylvania. 

 

More practically, horse taming was also an activity that would have been familiar to residents of the time. Horses were still ubiquitous in daily life, and equine equipage, livery, and management were sources of pride. 

 

A horse is a horse, of course, but the Highland Park horses carried layers of meaning.

 

1960, Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, University of Pittsburgh

 

 

Pittsburgh's Horse Tamers were created and installed at Highland Park in 1900 by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, who had migrated to Pittsburgh by way of Croatia and Austria. Moretti came to public attention in the States after being retained by Richard Morris Hunt, renowned Gilded Age architect of the Vanderbilt family. Hunt commissioned Moretti to work on the interiors of William K. Vanderbilt Sr.'s Marble House. Moretti's work there was a hit, and led to an invitation by the director of Pittsburgh's parks and public works, Edward M. Bigelow, to create and adorn Pittsburgh's boulevards and parks with sculpture.

 

Pittsburghers know Moretti's work, even if they don't know they know it. There are his four panthers adorning the Panther Hollow Bridge, his controversial Stephen Foster Memorial statue in Oakland's Schenley Plaza near the Carnegie Museums (at least until its removal by popular acclaim in 2018), and his imposing pillars at the main entrance to Highland Park. 

 

His Pittsburgh horses, though, are less well-recognized by residents. Even so, the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognized Moretti's Pittsburgh Horses as scaled-down replicas of the Coustou group of Marly Horses. 

 

The Pittsburgh Horses were done in bronze, finished in a green antique patina, and placed upon granite piers.

 

One of the 1901 Moretti Horse Tamers with an early steam automobile, Highland Park Stanton Avenue entrance.
Thomas Mellon Galey Photographs, Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center

An A for effort and intent is merited, but Moretti was no Coustou.

An artistic critique of Moretti's Pittsburgh Horses cannot ignore that the proportion of man to horse is, well, a bit off. Moretti's tail was at least a little perkier, we can give him that much. But he didn't have the skill to capture the terrific muscular strain of the tamer in action, and his horse looks more annoyed than terrified by restraint.

Moretti's Horse Tamer, 1922, Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, University of Pittsburgh

And while this is a matter of personal taste, an argument can be made that the green patina of these bronze sculptures is not nearly as inviting as the pristine veining of Carrerra marble. 

"As one muses on their past, what acts, what words, what shades rise up in judgment!"  As local architectural witnesses to recreational history, the Pittsburgh Horses have stood vigil to a century-long parade of dog-walkers, tennis players, and park-goers. Hardly history on the same scale as that witnessed by the Marly Horses, they are nonetheless Pittsburgh's own beloved Horse Tamers, born of skewed Perspective and verdigris, Guardians of Tennis Courts and Highland Park.