‘Immersed in Time’: Medardo Rosso and the originality of photomechanical reproduction

Writing in the Daily Mail in 1907, Medardo Rosso suggested that the previous two-thousand years of Western sculpture had left little more than an abundance of monumental ‘paperweights’. Against the ‘objectivity’ of this lineage he consistently emphasised the need for an art of vitality, his highest praise being reserved for the pursuit of the ‘infinite’ through a ‘preoccupation with the impression, the intuition of life, and the neglect of matter’.1 Although such sentiments were hardly novel, Rosso was exceptional in advocating a sculpture of growth and life while simultaneously turning away from modelling – the act in which a sculptor’s creativity was then typically vested – to devote over two decades to processes more readily associated with repetition. Yet these repetitions offered fascinating revisions, through which Rosso extended his sculptures’ subject matter into the means of their production: the idea of ongoing birth and continual becoming migrated from modelling to reproduction.