'How six Italian brothers shaped the history of New York City.'

Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

The Streets

The Picirelli brothers, masters of their craft, opened a workshop in the Bronx and used hammers and chisels to create some of the most important public sculptures in the city.

Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

Few people have shaped New York City's urban architecture as vividly as the stonecutting fraternity of Picirelli, six Italian immigrants who created one important public sculpture after another in their Bronx studio complex beginning in the 1890s.

From Alexander Hamilton at the U.S. Custom House in Bowling Green to the Bronx Zoo, from George Washington's figures on the Washington Arch in Greenwich Village to the reclining lions in front''s flagship building of the New York Public Library, Picirelli left his mark everywhere around the city.

Image

The allegorical figure of America at the U.S. Custom House in Bowling Green, one of the Four Continents made by the prolific Picirelli brothers from designs by Daniel Chester French.

Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

Image

The famous lion sculptures in front of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue near 42nd Street were among the many famous public works of art created by the Picirelli brothers, who emigrated from Italy in 1888.

"If you put aside the stonework aspect of the Picirelli brothers, each of them is incredibly talented in their''own right as independent sculptors," said Thayer Tolles, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "It's not just the Fireman's Monument and the Frick, it's the New York Stock Exchange, it's the Brooklyn Museum. They're everywhere, and you don't know it. "

Image

The figures on the pediment of the New York Stock Exchange were carved by the Picirelli brothers from models by sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward and Paul Wayland Bartlett. Younger brother Getulio was the chief carver.

Credit...Eduardo Montes-Bradley

The brothers - Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Getulio, Mazaniello and Orazio - skillfully combined dual professional identities. While their main endeavor was to embody the ideas of famous sculptors such as''Daniel Chester French, whose designs for Pichirelli's sculpture of Abraham Lincoln were carved from 28 blocks of Georgian marble weighing 150 tons for the Lincoln Memorial, they also created their own original works.

Attilio and Furio received their academic training in Rome, and Mr. French thought so highly of both artists that he acquired original works by both for the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was chairman of the museum's sculpture committee in the early 20th century.

Image

The only known photograph of all six Picirelli brothers who carved the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Credit...The American Magazine

'When you think about the amount of work the brothers have done''Pichirelli, they're everywhere,' said Thayer Tolles, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "It's not just the Fireman's Monument and the Frick, it's the New York Stock Exchange, it's the Brooklyn Museum. They're everywhere, and you don't know it. "

The Picirellis have been largely forgotten, however; they have been overshadowed by famous American sculptors such as French himself.

Now Eduardo Montes-Bradley, a 63-year-old filmmaker who grew up in Buenos Aires, wants to revive the brothers' legacy by throwing new light on their work in a documentary he's been working on for two years. The movie, "The Italian Factor," portrays these carvers not as stereotypical inept immigrants with "funny newspaper hats," as he puts it, but as''extraordinarily talented craftsmen essential to public art in the city and in America as a whole.

Image

Filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley, whose documentary "The Italian Factor" will show the largely forgotten Picirelli brothers as important contributors to early medieval public sculpture in New York City and across the nation.

Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times

"When we talk about Picirelli, we have to take our hats off," Montes-Bradley said. "They were at the pinnacle of their craft, and their father traced their origins in sculpture to the Renaissance, when Michelangelo found the stone for '\''David'\'' in Carrara," a marble center near the town of Massa, where the Picirellis grew up.

Traditional'. 'Sculptors working in America in the 19th and much of the 20th century usually modeled their sculptures in clay and then cast them in plaster. They then relied on skilled carvers, often Italians, to translate their ideas into stone, using the plaster casts as a guide. These carvers not only had the skill to reproduce the sculptor's images with hammer and chisel, but were also trained to use an important tool called a sharpening machine to accomplish the difficult task of embodying the sculptor's sculptural design on a larger, sometimes monumental, scale.

Image

One of hundreds of works made by the Picirelli brothers at Riverside Church.

Credit...Eduardo Montes-Bradley

For''Lincoln Memorial, for example, Mr. French sent a 7-foot plaster model of the president to Picirelli's studio in the Bronx, where the brothers carved a giant 19-foot statue that now stands triumphantly above the National Mall in Washington.

One morning, the evolution of stone-cutting technology was vividly displayed at the U.S.

The sharpening machine'. 'was a precision measuring device using a system of adjustable metal levers and pointers that could be placed at any point on a sculptural model, such as the top of the head, and used to determine the corresponding point on the surface of the marble replica.

When Montes-Bradley was explaining that the sharpening machine had been replaced by laser technology, he noticed two workers with the device mounted on a tripod. He ran up to the man in charge, Aaron Gonzales, and asked him questions.

Image

Attilio Picirelli in his family studio in the Bronx, working on a sketch of "Youth Leading Industry," a relief installed at Rockefeller Center in 1936. The sculpture, made of 45 blocks of Pyrex glass, was''Pyrex's innovative use of art. Like some other public artworks of the time, the work has been called fascist.

Credit...Eduardo Montes-Bradley Collection

"We are laser scanning" the facades of the Castom House and its sculptures, Mr. Gonzalez said, to create "virtual models" of the building that can be used for a future renovation and alteration project. "This device captures millions of dots per second," he said, pointing to his Faro laser scanner. "This is incredible technology. "

Montes-Bradley smiled. "A laser can make things easier and faster," he said, "but never better. Because it lacks the soul of the artist. "

This is where the brothers' come on the scene''Pichirelli.

In the decades before the brothers and their father Giuseppe came to New York and opened their first studio in a converted stable on 39th Street in Manhattan, sculptors working in America typically sent their plaster models to Italy to be copied in marble by carvers there. The process could take a year.

But there came a "moment of epiphany," Montes-Bradley said, when Mr. French discovered Picirelli's studio in Manhattan. "When he walked into this room, he must have thought, '\''My God, this looks like the great studios of Florence'\'" he said. It was a revelation, and that's when I thought, "Oh, my God.