Costantino Barbella was born in Chieti on 31 January 1852 into a large and poor family of eighteen children. His father’s name is Sebastiano Barbella and he is a trinket merchant. He came from the nearby Abruzzo town of Lanciano. His mother is the Teatina Maria Bevilacqua. During his adolescence, the boy started modelling clay crib figurines as a game, while helping in the shop. He was noticed by Baron Pasquale De Virgiliis, director of the Banco di Napoli in Chieti, who bought him some early works and reprimanded Sebastiano. Barbella recalled years later:

“My father mocked anyone who spoke to him about me, and gave no thought to my aptitude”

The young man attended technical schools in Chieti and graduated. In 1869, he befriended Francesco Paolo Michetti. The great painter would literally change his life.

In 1871, Sebastiano Barbella guarantees a loan to a merchant friend who then flees with the money he received to America and is declared bankrupt. Sebastiano has a heart attack and dies. From this moment on, Costantino Barbella has to take financial care of his large family. Michetti convinces him to compete for a scholarship from the Province of Chieti. Barbella won the grant which gave him the opportunity to study in Naples with Stanislao Lista by presenting the group Deposition from the Cross. The work Figure of a Child (1874), formerly in the Rotondo collection in Naples, and recently reappeared on the antiques market (Finarte sale on 11 July 2023), in its adherence to contemporary Neapolitan verism, with the figure of the “scugnizzo” (street urchin), evokes the first crib figures painted in his father’s shop.

Barbella exhibited Rosina, the peasant girl from Abruzzo at the 1873 Promotrice in Naples, which – from what we know – is a translation into sculpture of the idylls of Michetti fortunysta. The group The Joy of Innocence after Work, 1874, was purchased by the Società Promotrice for the king, who gave it to the Capodimonte Museum, and translated into small format, with the title Idyll. Following an accident that happened to a porter, the group broke before the exhibition, and the artist began at that juncture to measure himself with restoration and patina, arts in which he would become a master.

In the same year, 1874, he returned to Chieti and conceived a masterpiece, the Monument to Luigi Vicoli (1875), a work destined for the city’s Cemetery in which the connection with the Neapolitan Baroque tradition is easily readable. Death pounces on the young figure, who covers his eyes in despair, in a stroke of theatre, while the ivy seals the eternity of the vision.

In a work from 1876, Return from the countryside, exhibited that year at the Società d’incoraggiamento delle Belle Arti in Florence, the artist studies the posture of two peasant girls, lost in a happy song. By a sort of ars combinatoria, congenial to him, the figures soon became three. At the National Exhibition in Naples in 1877, Barbella was awarded a gold medal with the most famous work of his entire life: Love Song. The sculpture consists of three embracing maidens walking singing, in whose image the artist intends to represent his three sisters. Gabriele d’Annunzio enthusiastically reviewed the work, and likened the group to the works “of the good Greek times”. Love song received widespread public and critical acclaim. Barbella receives the coveted honour of Honorary Professor of Fine Arts.

These were the happy years in which the artist executed terracottas and bronzes illustrating the Abruzzese epos, with rhetorical accents that were at times anticipatory of Michelotti’s own research. The protagonists of his works are almost always people from Abruzzo, whom the sculptor captures with exact and careful investigation. The vague romantic themes that vein almost all his works with pathos bring Barbelli’s poetics closer to that of d’Annunzio. The sensuality of the work April (Dare) is echoed in the characters of D’Annunzio’s silloge Terra Vergine. The friendship between Barbella and d’Annunzio dates back to the years before the creation of the Cenacolo michettiano (circol of artists and writers) in the Francavilla Convent, which the painter bought with the proceeds of the prize money awarded to the Voto.

In 1878 Barbella presented  Love Song at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, winning a silver medal.
In 1880 he exhibited his large group La paciera at the IX Promotrice in Turin, which was bought by the same Promotrice Society. In 1882, Primo Levi ‘l’Italico’ dedicated praise and esteem to him in the last pages of his novel Abruzzo forte e gentile:

“I shall not forget you, suave Barbella, elected champion of Abruzzese kindness. You who discovered the exquisite sense of rough people, and twice ennobled clay, in the face of art with the minute perfection of your works, in the face of humanity, with the delicacy of a true, who, searching among pariahs, you discovered made of beauty”.

With Michetti triumphing with his Il voto, Barbella presented no less than nine works in 1883 at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts (in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni): two terracottas, the Departure of the conscript and the Return of the soldier were purchased by the Ministry of Education for the nascent Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome. He opened a studio on the Via Flaminia where, according to Arturo Lancellotti’s recollection, he used to receive visitors on Wednesdays; he often worked in a second studio in Tivoli.
In 1885, with great spirit of initiative, he set up the Italian section at the International Exhibition in Antwerp, and in 1886 exhibited in Berlin. Although he sometimes executed larger statues, he loved to devote himself to small-format representations in figures. The themes linked to the Abruzzo region are carried on, sometimes with greater psychological excavation, an indication of a research conducted by the artist with great introspective capacities. This is the case with The Cherry (1887), which depicts a moment of suspension of the young seller, who – having dropped the stadera with which she weighs the fruit – indulges in a melancholic thought. Prone to melancholy and of humble character is the sculptor himself. The artist’s grandson, Alfonso Cauli, recalled an anecdote: Maria Hardouin said she should have married him and not Gabriele d’Annunzio.

In 1889 Barbella conceived another masterpiece, The Bride, which he presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In “La Tribuna Illustrata” (18 May 1890), D’Annunzio reviewed it analytically, beginning with this lofty speech

“The sculptor of Abruzzo wanted to fix on earth one of the most moving moments of human life, that is, the moment in which the young girl leaves her mother’s roof and follows the man who has asked her to marry him. Future art historians will have little trouble establishing the era in which this group was composed. They will guess that the sculptor drew it from a moment in his life when the dream of art seemed for a moment obscured and overcome by the dream of love. But the artist treasured his intimate state, processed it as something not his own, and made it objective, with deep feeling and an intimate thrill of being his own. The gentle creature to whom he dedicated this noble work must be very grateful to him for having, by virtue of his virtue, fixed in clay the sweet melancholic poetry of the wedding and the farewell said to his beloved mother…”.

Indeed, in that year Barbella had married Antonietta Corvi of Sulmona, while continuing to father the three sisters of Canto d’amore, one of whom remained with him for the rest of his life.
In 1891, he presented ten works in Palermo that were enthusiastically reviewed in “La Tribuna Illustrata”. Among the works, the reviewer (d’Annunzio himself), identified a ‘prima maniera’ Barbella, linked to Michelotti’s idylls, and a new artist, who was changing register, with a more solemn and rhetorical tone, identifying him with the work Noli me tangere. The latter sculpture has been likened by Isabella Valente to the manner of Gaetano Renda. D’Annunzio writes:

“… with this bust Barbella has pleased the few grumblers and himself; but even in this work, modelled with great breadth and which is one of the best in the Exhibition, one can detect an exquisite feeling and a scrupulous observation of reality. The brusque, almost virile gesture, with the elbow pointing up, is typical of the unceremonious peasant girl, while the beautiful biso expresses a little fear of a more energetic assault and a little complacency at being desired.
Thus, whether in small or large works, Barbella will always maintain a physiognomy all his own, which no one will be able to steal from him and many will have to envy him: he always remains the artist of feeling”.

In 1896, the Province of Chieti donated his Canefora to Princess Elena of Montenegro, on the occasion of her wedding to the future King Victor Emmanuel III. The work depicts a woman dressed in a tunic scattering flowers that she holds in the crook of her dress. D’Annunzio celebrated Barbella with the article published in L’Illustrazione Italiana of 8 November 1896, Della bellezza di Elena e del bronzo, in which he established a fortunate comparison by antithesis between Barbella and Gemito:

“I would like my readers, those ten whom I imagine to be “good connoisseurs”, to be able to see Barbelli’s latest casting with their own eyes. This bronze does not have its perfection, that something dry, hard, beaten, so to speak, that makes the bronze of most contemporary sculptors unpleasant. But it leaves its rigidity behind, and takes on a warm, dark tone and retains something of the soft flower that was in the lost model, some part of the light soul that the supreme touches and almost I would say the supreme caresses of the craftsman had infused into the obedient wax”.

In 1897, the sculptor developed the group The Counsellor, often called Intimate Struggle, in which an elderly figure addresses a visibly restless young peasant girl. The two figures will later be combined differently: the figure of the young woman will also be presented alone under the title Rancour. As mentioned, Barbella’s use of a combinatory technique also reflected the great success of his themes, and the demand for them from his patrons. To certify his success, a few years later, Pietro Mascagni wrote to him in a letter from Pesaro on 31 December 1899:

“[…] Now we want to celebrate the New Year […] A work by Barbella is always the best ornament in a drawing room; and I, wanting to make a present to myself for my home, thought of you who are a great artist and a heart of gold”.

Barbella in this period executed numerous portraits commissioned by influential personalities such as the one for Mascagni himself (1898) or for the influential Cardinal Rampolla, or for various members of the Italian royal family.
Alongside this production, always of high quality, around 1900, he began to produce some female nudes. These are works related to contemporary aesthetic developments, preceded by a more prissy work from a few years earlier, entitled Woman with an oil lamp of 1890: Dream! (also referred to as Happy Dreams, 1900), as well as works of greater adherence to Art Nouveau taste, such as Attraction (1910), Awakening (1910), and above all Inebriation (1912).
The Roman writer Paolo Orano coined the happy definition of ‘a great sculptor of small statues’ for Barbella (1906). In that same year, he lost his wife Antonietta, who was ill with consumption. In 1909, the sculptor declared to Onorato Roux (in Infanzia e giovinezza di illustri italiani contemporanei):

“I always study in order to know how art should feel; and continuous work makes me happy. One lives with battles, because one always hopes to win. And for me the fight is life”.

But the fight for life causes so many wounds that add up. In 1916, he is devastated by the death of composer Francesco Paolo Tosti. On 6 November 1918, his son Bruno also died, from complications of the Spanish flu epidemic, while engaged in the operations of the Great War, in which he had enlisted as a volunteer.
Barbella became progressively visually impaired, and withdrew into solitude. After a visit to Barbella’s now empty studio, the journalist Alberto Orsi (in the magazine “Noi e il mondo” of 1 January 1917) wrote:

“[…] Few know what a torture inaction is for Costantino Barbella, because few know that the life of the great Abruzzese sculptor was a continuous explosion of lively industriousness […]”.

The sculptor was only consoled by the assistance of his daughter Bianca, who renounced becoming a nun and married Baron Franco Càuli of Casalanguida in 1924.
At the 1919 International Exhibition of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts in Rome, he presented one of his last works, The Blind Man (1916). Barbella gave the sculpture the new title Light in the Darkness, suggesting an autobiographical reading of his physical suffering, which was measured against the life force of the sculpture.
Barbella died in Rome on 5 December 1925.

Bibliography

Lancellotti, Costantino Barbella (1852-1925), Rome 1934.

Di Tizio, Costantino Barbella, Chieti 1991

Del Cimmuto, I. Valente, Costantino Barbella. Fogli di pensieri, Naples 2014.

AA.VV., Dall’idea alla forma. Costantino Barbella. 61 schizzi e 33 sculture, introduction of Vittorio Sgarbi, Pescara 2016.