Il Pescatoriello Marvasi (The Marvasi Fisherboy)

Il Pescatoriello is a sensitive and intimate portrayal of a young boy absorbed in the task of clenching a wriggling, slippery fish in his hands. The bronze is the first and finest cast of the model, Gemito’s earliest composition from his career-defining series of representations of fisherboys. Sometimes referred to as Il Pescatoriello Marvasi after its commissioner, Diomede Marvasi, the work embodies Gemito’s ability to transform an everyday subject into a timeless meditation on youth. Inspired by ancient bronze depictions of adolescent male nudes, Gemito imbued his work with the aura of antiquity by giving his bronze an aged appearance and by mounting it on a base decorated with a border design drawn from ancient Pompeian sculptures.



Gemito’s sympathetic handling of his subject may be attributed, at least in part, to his own experience as an impoverished youth. An essentially self-taught artist, he began life as an orphan. Discovered on the foundling hospital’s doorstep and adopted by a poor artisan, he started working in a sculptor’s workshop at the age of nine. The naturalism of Il Pescatoriello marks a dramatic shift from earlier artists’ sentimentalizing or eroticizing depictions of scugnizzo – a nickname given to children in Naples – that appealed to the voyeurism of outsiders.