Description
The Monument to Virgil is Floriano Bodini's large white marble sculpture in the gardens of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, on Brindisi's waterfront. It looks out toward the eastern sea, in the city where the poet of the Aeneid died in 19 BC.
On top of a column stands an armless Winged Victory, and a shroud slides down the column: for the sculptor there is no victory without pain and mourning. Around the base are the symbols of Virgil's themes: a helmet, a horse, a dog, a lamb and an olive branch.
Together they tell of the contrasts that run through the poet's works, from the Aeneid to the Georgics and the Eclogues: war and peace, good and evil, the active life and the contemplative one.
The marble is Carrara statuary marble, worked in the Nicoli studio: Bodini knew that world well, as he directed the Carrara Academy of Fine Arts until 1987. He chose it by instinct, as a “material charged with the echoes of the greatest classical tradition, from Phidias to Moore.” The setting has a meaning too: the eastern sea from which Aeneas's journey sets out.
The work was commissioned in 1981 for the two-thousandth anniversary of the poet's death and unveiled on March 27, 1986. In 1988 it was moved to where it stands today, although Bodini had pictured it in nearby Piazzetta Dionisi, where Virgil spent his last hours.
The poet had a house on the waterfront, opposite the Roman columns, and died shortly after returning from a journey to Greece. For Aeneas's landing he had drawn on the harbor of Brindisi itself, sheltered by its deer-head shape.
For the sculptor that name ran in the family: his maternal grandfather, the painter and fresco artist Virgilio Mascioni, was the first to make him love art.
On top of a column stands an armless Winged Victory, and a shroud slides down the column: for the sculptor there is no victory without pain and mourning. Around the base are the symbols of Virgil's themes: a helmet, a horse, a dog, a lamb and an olive branch.
Together they tell of the contrasts that run through the poet's works, from the Aeneid to the Georgics and the Eclogues: war and peace, good and evil, the active life and the contemplative one.
The marble is Carrara statuary marble, worked in the Nicoli studio: Bodini knew that world well, as he directed the Carrara Academy of Fine Arts until 1987. He chose it by instinct, as a “material charged with the echoes of the greatest classical tradition, from Phidias to Moore.” The setting has a meaning too: the eastern sea from which Aeneas's journey sets out.
The work was commissioned in 1981 for the two-thousandth anniversary of the poet's death and unveiled on March 27, 1986. In 1988 it was moved to where it stands today, although Bodini had pictured it in nearby Piazzetta Dionisi, where Virgil spent his last hours.
The poet had a house on the waterfront, opposite the Roman columns, and died shortly after returning from a journey to Greece. For Aeneas's landing he had drawn on the harbor of Brindisi itself, sheltered by its deer-head shape.
For the sculptor that name ran in the family: his maternal grandfather, the painter and fresco artist Virgilio Mascioni, was the first to make him love art.