French, Piccirilli, Bristow: An Unexpected Trilogy

What brought me to the Piccirilli Brothers was Daniel Chester French. The film on French — commissioned by Chesterwood and the National Trust for Historic Preservation — was my first real encounter with the world of American public monuments and sculpture, and it opened a question I hadn’t expected to ask: who designs a work, and who makes it? In English the slippage between “sculptor” and “stone carver” is more than a matter of vocabulary. It’s a hierarchy.

Daniel Chester French Studio

Once I fell into that rabbit hole — while still admiring French’s designs and the entrepreneurial intelligence with which he built one of the great American sculpture careers — I came to the Piccirilli Brothers. French’s biographers had filed them under stone carvers. That label, repeated for a century, lay across their work like a tombstone, and it made it difficult for them to emerge as sculptors in their own right. French himself seems to have known better. While serving as a trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was instrumental in the acquisition of work by Furio and Attilio Piccirilli — a quiet public recognition of authorship that the literature has never quite caught up with. The standard portrait of the brothers is still the one I wanted to push against: Italian carvers in paper hats, making spaghetti in the kitchen, drinking wine, charming the patrician New England sculptors who hired them.

The case for the Piccirilli film was twofold. The first reason was to lift that tombstone. The second was that their rabbit hole led somewhere I hadn’t anticipated: back across the Atlantic to Massa-Carrara, their hometown. The Piccirillis did not appear from nowhere. They belonged to a long line of Italian carvers — by community if not always by bloodline — working marble that has been quarried in the Apuan Alps and worked since Michelangelo’s day. The film widened, almost on its own, from a New York biography into a much older inheritance.

Atilio Piccirilli

I owe a great deal to Thayer Tolles, the Met’s curator of American sculpture, who appears in the film and whose scholarship has done more than anyone’s to bring the Piccirillis back into view.

Then came Bristow, and a different problem entirely.

George Frederick Bristow was a commission, and at some point in the work I realized I could not approach him the way I had approached French or the Piccirillis. A composer’s work is not something you can stand in front of in a public park. Most of Bristow’s manuscripts survive in the Bristow papers at the New York Public Library. Music is not something you hang on a wall. It isn’t there every day. It has to be found, arranged, rehearsed, and played — and once it’s played, it’s gone again. A recording is not the same thing, any more than a souvenir is the same thing as the Lincoln Memorial. The monument is permanently there; the symphony has to be summoned each time.

From the film Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow

Because Bristow couldn’t be represented through his work the way a sculptor can, the third film had to do something the first two hadn’t. It had to build context. I brought in Whitman, Poe, and Melville. I brought in the painters of the Hudson River School. I brought in the Civil War. A composer who has been forgotten cannot be explained by his scores alone; he has to be placed inside the country that produced him and then misplaced him.

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The Trilogy

By the time I finished Bristow I understood that the three films had become something I had not set out to make. French gave me the question. The Piccirillis carried it across an ocean. Bristow forced me to reach beyond sculpture entirely — into literature, painting, and history — because music demanded it. Together they trace, more or less by accident, the nineteenth-century American search for a cultural identity.

Bristow is probably the better-accomplished film, but only because by the time I made it I had already learned what French and the Piccirillis had to teach. What I would say is this: the three films belong together. I hope that institutions programming them in the future — for exhibition, for retrospective, for whatever form their afterlife takes — will consider showing them as a cycle, over a week or whatever interval suits the venue. They were not conceived as a trilogy. They became one.