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The Italian Ministry of Culture has declared several works by Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) to be of ‘national cultural interest’ and therefore not exportable. This decree is based on the premise of Ro...

Medardo Rosso was a pivotal yet enigmatic figure for the origin and development of modern European sculpture. In his fewer than 50 original subjects cast in plaster, wax, and bronze, he represented emotionally charged glimpses of introverted, sick, laughing, anxious, or smiling heads and figurines, especially of women, children, and the elderly. By modulating sculpture’s surfaces, he made his diaphanously modelled images receptive to subtle changes of light, expressing a radical idea of ‘dematerialising’ the three-dimensional object, as if it were subject to the influence of time and its surrounding atmosphere. Rosso began his career in Milan but spent three decades in Paris and was naturalised as a French citizen before returning to Milan in his final years. He was considered the founder of ‘Impressionist sculpture’, although his works also reflect the influence of Realism and Symbolism. In France, critics believed he was Auguste Rodin’s unacknowledged rival in the birth of modern sculpture and an influence on the 1898 Monument to Balzac. In Italy, he was hailed as the forefather of Futurism, prefiguring their experiments with movement and speed. Today, contemporary artists admire his precocious interest in materials and creative casting that left evidence of artistic process on his works.

This introductory chapter discusses how nineteenth-century art, defined by the birth of the nation-state and nationalism, is teeming with transnational forms of circulation. Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso took advantage of new international networks being created by so-called “cultural mediators” (middlemen—art dealers, critics and literary figures—who regularly traveled abroad), including exhibition opportunities and art markets throughout Europe. In doing so, he presaged the nomadic, itinerant status of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture. The chapter offers a methodological challenge to the grand narrative of the nineteenth century by reframing a single artist within a cultural context characterized by transnational exchange and new forms of mobility. It provides an original, transnational way to comprehend Rosso and is intended as a model for future studies of pan-European modern art.

This chapter looks at the shift in Medardo Rosso's position from an outsider in his own country to a foreigner in France. Rosso's move to Paris belongs to the wider phenomenon of increased migration by artists to the principal metropolis of modern art toward the end of the century. It also confirms his awareness of a new kind of transnational mobility. Tracing Rosso's trajectory as a form of self-exile characteristic of cultural anarchists, the chapter examines his hopeful but obstacle-ridden expatriation and his struggle to make avant-garde sculpture in the epoch and city dominated by Rodin. Paris at the end of the nineteenth-century offered Rosso new opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for serial sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics.

This chapter follows Medardo Rosso's peregrinations in his last decade of international expansion. At that time, it became clear to Rosso that being in Paris would not suffice to create a truly international reputation and fully disseminate his revolutionary ideas. He began to travel around Europe to promote his art, relying on international networks and new opportunities that characterized the first decade of the twentieth century. At the same time, Rosso's attempt to create a meaningful identity for himself without recourse to fixed symbolic structures of nationalism further intensified his uneasy position as a perennial outsider. He poignantly captured this sense of alienation in his final masterpiece, Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906), a haunting, larger-than-life head of the son of a wealthy London collector.

This concluding chapter explains how Medardo Rosso's posthumous reputation is another story that remains to be told. Except for a handful of enlightened art historians, such as Carola Giedion-Welcker and H. W. Janson, who included Rosso in their histories of modern art, Rosso was forgotten by the world after his death. In 1963 he was suddenly propelled back onto the international art scene by Margaret Scolari Barr, who wrote the first English monograph on Rosso. Since the 1970s, Rosso has been fully reclaimed by Italy and reframed within the nineteenth-century Italian Scapigliatura movement, a tale of local origins that Rosso himself had denied. Today, due to the many international artists inspired by Rosso's work, he has become the only Italian sculptor of his time to be globalized.

This chapter contextualizes Medardo Rosso's early life and the beginning of his career within the uncertain nationalism and ambivalent internationalism that characterized Italy in the two decades after its unification. Rosso grew up in the aftermath of the Risorgimento. Like many Italians of his generation, he was disenchanted by the unfulfilled promises of national unity, a dissatisfaction he dared to express in his early art. His first works of the 1880s define his enterprise within the hopes and disillusionments of these post-Risorgimento decades. His unorthodox approach suggests that, early on, he developed unique artistic solutions compared to those of his compatriots. This approach was especially notable in his rejection of the tradition of heroic mythmaking in sculpture.

This chapter introduces the modern strategies that Medardo Rosso developed to reach an audience during his Parisian years. He worked mostly on a small scale and cast in his studio rather than having his sculptures cast by commercial foundries. He also began to exploit the new middle-class taste for cheaper sculptural materials, casting works in wax and plaster and selling them as finished pieces. He capitalized on his experience in Italian foundries, where the cire perdue (lost wax) method was regularly employed for casting bronzes, to generate special excitement around his sculptures. Rosso attempted to personalize his relationship with buyers and circumvent the Parisian gallery system that was becoming the intermediary between avant-garde art and a new bourgeois audience.

This chapter focuses on the sculptures Rosso made during his Parisian years. Medardo Rosso created such extraordinarily advanced work as Après la visite (After the Visit); Impression de Boulevard, Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard, Woman with a Veil); and Madame X. Rosso registered in these sculptures an uneasiness about personal encounters that related to his own experience as an alienated artist working at the margins. His innovative artistic intuitions and itinerant self-fashioning would pave the way for the next generation of foreign artists in the city, breaking ground for younger sculptors such as the Romanian Constantin Brancusi and the Swiss Alberto Giacometti, who enjoyed successful careers in Paris after 1900 and made significant contributions to the international birth of modern sculpture.

This chapter analyzes Medardo Rosso's career in Italy in light of the shifting political climate in the mid- to late 1880s. His increasingly internationalist viewpoint had political and cultural implications that illuminate his career choices as well as the disoriented and fragmented historical moment in Italy and its complex relationship to France. His work was criticized at home during a decade of growing tensions caused by Italy's fragile democratic system and the nationalism of the ruling class and its supporters. This was a delicate time politically, soon after Italy had joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria–Hungary, and imposed trade wars against France. Rosso's early alertness to European prospects resonates with the political currents of progressive democratic internationalism that developed in Italy during the 1880s.

Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is one of the most original and influential figures in the history of modern art, and this book is the first historically substantiated critical account of his life and work. An innovative sculptor, photographer, and draftsman, Rosso was vital in paving the way for the transition from the academic forms of sculpture that persisted in the nineteenth century to the development of new and experimental forms in the twentieth century. His antimonumental, antiheroic work reflected alienation in the modern experience yet showed deep feeling for interactions between self and other. Rosso's art was transnational: he refused allegiance to a single culture or artistic heritage and declared himself both a citizen of the world and a maker of art without national limits. This book develops a narrative that is an alternative to the dominant Franco-centered perspective on the origin of modern sculpture in which Rodin plays the role of lone heroic innovator. Offering an original way to comprehend Rosso, the book negotiates the competing cultural imperatives of nationalism and internationalism that shaped the European art world at the fin de siècle.

This chapter examines the shift that emerged in Medardo Rosso's art from 1883 onward, when he made a new series of sculptural experiments that came to be labeled Scapigliato, Verista, and Impressionist by several critics. Another critic associated his art with the techniques of the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the previous generation; by 1887, it was being explicitly associated with French Impressionism. The chapter analyzes what might have been known in Italy about French Impressionism in the 1880s and assesses its reception in the art and literature of the time. It follows with a close analysis of Rossos innovative sculptures of urban subjects like Carne altrui (Flesh of Others) and La Portinaia (Concierge, both 1883–84), whose broken-up, painterly surfaces became permeable to transient effects of light, shadow, and atmosphere.

This chapter traces four significant rejections that marked Medardo Rosso's early career in Italy. He made two revolutionary monument proposals for Giuseppe Garibaldi, but the Italian establishment immediately rejected them. In these public projects, Rosso dared to criticize what he saw as falsely reassuring nation-building myths. Rosso also was expelled from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, and his first radical funerary monument, La Riconoscenza, was removed from the local cemetery for its frank and emotionally explicit portrayal of mourning and death. The chapter argues that Rosso adopted an artistic language of protest to experiment with new forms of expression that rejected the heroic idioms of traditional sculpture. His original antiheroic monument proposals expressed far-reaching ideas that aimed to revolutionize the concept of the monument in modern times.

From 1968 to 2005, Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro made mixed-media sculptural installations featuring the well-known geographical ‘boot’ of Italy. He placed these curious maps, fitted with ironic titles, in various positions – hanging, tilted, inverted, lying on the ground – and locations. The works have elicited multiple interpretations, ranging from formal, material experiments and anecdotal vignettes to wry references to the darker side of Italian history. Fragmented and united, light and heavy, simple and complex, Fabro’s Italie pose deeper questions about the contradictions of Italy’s national identity as it struggles to emerge from its past into modern times.

Women who receive positive or uninformative BRCA1/2 test results face a number of decisions about how to manage their cancer risk. The purpose of this study was to prospectively examine the effect of receiving a positive versus uninformative BRCA1/2 genetic test result on the perceived pros and cons of risk-reducing mastectomy (RRM) and risk-reducing oophorectomy (RRO) and breast cancer screening. We further examined how perceived pros and cons of surgery predict intention for and uptake of surgery. 308 women (146 positive, 162 uninformative) were included in RRM and breast cancer screening analyses. 276 women were included in RRO analyses. Participants completed questionnaires at pre-disclosure baseline and 1-, 6-, and 12-months post-disclosure. We used linear multiple regression to assess whether test result contributed to change in pros and cons and logistic regression to predict intentions and surgery uptake. Receipt of a positive BRCA1/2 test result predicted stronger pros for RRM and RRO (P < 0.001), but not perceived cons of RRM and RRO. Pros of surgery predicted RRM and RRO intentions in carriers and RRO intentions in uninformatives. Cons predicted RRM intentions in carriers. Pros and cons predicted carriers’ RRO uptake in the year after testing (P < 0.001). Receipt of BRCA1/2 mutation test results impacts how carriers see the positive aspects of RRO and RRM and their surgical intentions. Both the positive and negative aspects predict uptake of surgery.

Purpose The number of patients with cancer enrolling in phase I trials is expected to increase as these trials incorporate patient selection and exhibit greater efficacy in the era of targeted therapies. Despite the fact that people with advanced cancer often require a caregiver, little is known about the experience of caregivers of people enrolling in oncology phase I clinical trials. We conducted a cross-sectional study assessing the distress and emotion regulation of caregivers of phase I trial participants to inform the design of future interventions targeting the unique needs of this population. Methods Caregivers of oncology patients were approached at the patient's phase I clinical trial screening visit. Caregiver participants completed a one-time survey incorporating validated instruments to comprehensively assess distress and emotion regulation. Basic demographic information about both the caregiver and patient was collected. Results Caregivers exhibited greater distress than population norms. Emotion regulation was also moderately impaired. Respondents identified positive aspects of caregiving despite exhibiting moderate distress. Conclusion Enrollment of a patient in a phase I clinical trial is a time of stress for their caregivers. This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of engaging caregivers of phase I trial participants and the need to better support them through this component of their caregiving experience. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.