Costantino Barbella - The Bride Or Farewell (1891)

terracotta, 70 x 64 x 35 cm

Signed and dated on the base: ‘Costantino Barbella 1891’.

Exhibitions: 1891 National Exhibition of Palermo

Costantino Barbella was born in Chieti on 31 January 1852 into a large, poor family of eighteen children.
The artist executed terracottas and bronzes illustrating the Abruzzi epos, with rhetorical accents anticipating Michelangelo's own research. The protagonists of his works are almost always people from Abruzzo, whom the sculptor captures with exact and careful investigation. 
In 1889 Barbella conceived The Bride, which he presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In ‘La Tribuna Illustrata’ (18 May 1890), D'Annunzio reviewed it analytically, beginning with this lofty speech

"The sculptor of Abruzzo wanted to fix on earth one of the most moving moments of human life, that is, the moment in which the young girl leaves her mother's roof and follows the man who has asked her to marry him. Future art historians will have little trouble establishing the era in which this group was composed. They will guess that the sculptor drew it from a moment in his life when the dream of art seemed for a moment obscured and overcome by the dream of love. But the artist treasured his intimate state, processed it as something not his own, and made it objective, with deep feeling and an intimate thrill of being his own. The gentle creature to whom he dedicated this noble work of his must be very grateful to him for having, by his virtue, fixed in clay the sweet melancholic poetry of the wedding and the farewell said to his beloved mother..."