The five Piccirilli brothers of The Bronx are the world's greatest team of sculptors. But, like the Pisani of the 13th Century, they prefer to think of themselves as "masters of stone." As such, they make most of their money anonymously converting into their own Italian marble the clay and plaster models of less handy and sometimes more famed U. S. sculptors. Last week, for probably the first time in Piccirilli history, someone else had the job of executing work by a Piccirilli.
For a year Brother Attilio worked on the design, first in clay, then in plaster, for the world's biggest sculptural glass panel, to go over the door of the Italian Building in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. The panel, 10 ft. by 16 ft., took seven tons of clay, showed one huge figure shoveling. The Piccirillis are not glass workers. The model went to the Corning Glass Works for casting. Corning divided the panel into 45 sections to be joined by transparent cement, used a so-called "poetic" Pyrex glass filled with air bubbles. Last week Corning had finished the Italian Building panel, promised delivery next month.
The Piccirillis are the Bronx climax of a distinguished family of Tuscans who, originally from Spain, worked in stone for two centuries around Carrara and Massa between the mountains and the sea, fought with Garibaldi and emigrated to Manhattan in 1888.
The father was a sculptor. All six of his sons followed his example: Ferucchio, now 73 and back in Italy; Furio, 71, specialist in animal figures; Tommaso, 69, summering last week at Far Rockaway, L. I.; Attilio, 67, foremost sculptor of the brothers; Horatio, 65, another animal specialist; Guitilio, 63, marble carver, critic and the firm's businessman. All but Ferucchio are now U. S. citizens.
Forty-five years ago Father Piccirilli moved from central Manhattan to The Bronx, built a red brick house across several city lots with a large carriage door through which to haul out big sculptures. His sons he sent back to Italy one by one to study at Rome's Accademia San Luca. U. S. sculptors presently found that the Piccirillis could finish their works in marble better than they could themselves. Through the years the six brothers faithfully executed such work by other sculptors as Frederick MacMonnies' Civic Virtue in Manhattan, Daniel Chester French's great Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., and Robert Aitken's pediment for the west portico of the brand new Supreme Court Building in Washington, into which Sculptor Aitken put the faces of Chief Justice Hughes, William Howard Taft, John Marshall (as a boy), Architect Cass Gilbert and himself. The brothers' business boomed. The red brick house grew to a 20-room catacomb of high-ceilinged workshops, spare of furniture, full of great lumps of stone, clay, plaster. One piece, a huge statue of James Monroe, ordered and paid for by a Venezuelan President who lost his job unexpectedly, stood around for 30 years until the Piccirillis gave it to the State of Virginia. On another piece the Christian Science Church paid 20 years' storage charges.