Babbling Like I Know Something About Sculpture

One of the great things about living in Gloucester is the proximity to the working place of some genuinely great sculptors. For this reason, there is a substantial amount of sculpture here, far more than you would find in most towns of 30,000 people. The most famous locally is Leonard Craske’s Man At The Wheel on Stacy Boulevard followed by Anna Hyatt Huntington’s huge statue of Joan of Arc just down the street from me. It’s pretty difficult for me to leave the house without passing “Joanie on her pony” on my way home. I love it.

Charles Grafly, Richard Reccia, and Paul Manship, famous for his statue of the golden Prometheus in Rockefeller Center all lived and worked here. One of my favorite sculptors is Bela Pratt and, of course, Walker Hancock. I fell in love with Hancock’s Angel, which I’ve written about here before, long before I ever knew about Gloucester. I’ve also had the wonderful gift of being able to stay at Hancock’s studio as a writer’s retreat. Last summer I spent a few days there while I finished the final draft of My Last Romance. And over Christmas and New Years I stayed there working The Old Mermaid’s Tale. So sculpture influences my writing life --- it's about time I write about it.

The reason I am thinking about this embarrassment of riches is because I have started work on the first revision of my second novel, Each Angel Burns which centers around the disappearance of the sculpture of an angel made by 19th century Italian sculptor Giovanni Dupré (1817-1882).

I first discovered Dupré thanks to an article in Sculpture Review Magazine some years back. He was a classical sculptor at a time when European sculptors had succumbed to a type of modernism that I’m still reserving judgement about. But Dupré’s work is exquisite. My favorite of his works is a figure he called Modesty (left) which is part of a funerary monument in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence. This monument is also features a statue of St. Michael the Archangel which inspired the piece I am working on.

One of the fun things about being a novelist is having the latitude to create an entire world — actually, that’s pretty intoxicating. As you do that you also have the ability to explore things that interest you and to weave them into your story under the assumption that there might be a few other people out there who will find it interesting.

So after I discovered Dupré’s St. Michael my busy little brain went into overdrive and, in my novelist’s arrogance, decided that St. Michael had a companion piece, a statue of St. Gabriel, and that it had somehow arrived in America and then somehow disappeared. Though the statue of St. Gabriel is totally my invention, Dupré did create companion statues such as his Cain and Abel in The Hermitage.

What’s fun about this is that you can spend time studying sculptor and his times and his work and weave that into your story. Discovering Dupré was a great gift for me because he worked at a time that was entirely compatible with the background of my story. I love the sculpture of Bernini but he lived so long ago and became so famous and valuable that I couldn’t have created a plausible story around one of his fictionalized pieces.

So I am learning about Dupré. It’s funny how much reading and research a writer does compared to what actually makes it into the finished piece. It’s the old iceberg analogy. But I am happy to know these things and cherish the thought that maybe somone will read what I write and spend a little time investigating the work of Giovanni Dupré.

Thanks for reading.