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Gaetano Federici (September 22, 1880 - February 15, 1964): American sculptor, sometimes called "the Paterson Master," or Paterson's "sculptor-laureate," Federici created a body of distinctive realist work in various media memorializing a half-century of his city's history through public portraits of some its most famous living or recently-deceased citizens: U.S. Congressman James Stewart, U.S. Senator Bill Hughes, "Dean" William McNulty (a leader in the R.C. Archdiocese), and Paterson Mayors Nathan Barnert and Thomas McBride, among others.

Working under a variety of public and private commissions, mainly from his home community, his output over the course of his active life was prodigious. Researchers have counted a total of at least forty of his decorative or commemorative works--several of them monumental--outdoor and indoor, civic and ecclesiastical, full-size, round, relief, busts, plaques, marble, stone, bronze and plaster--in plazas and buildings, schools, churches, businesses and other public and semi-public places within a two-mile radius of Paterson's City Hall. It is a record that perhaps no other single artist in any other city in the U.S. of equivalent size can match. [note]

And all his works are distinguished by the hallmark benign realism that led to his characterization in his first retrospective exhibition in 1980 as "The Artist as Historian." [note]

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER Gaetano was born in the then-impoverished mountain village of Castelgrande (Basilicata), Italy, first child of Antonio Federici (dates), a mason {"muratore") and Teresa Mugnaio (dates), a peasant (contadina) and seamstress [note]. His parents' devotion to their newly-liberated nation is apparent in the naming of their first-born for the Peace of Gaeta [note]. But the combination of poverty, hope and ambition that encouraged so many Italians to emigrate in this post-unification period also brought them to the U.S. together in, when Gaetano was ....[note] The young family appears to have found an immediate home in Paterson, NJ, a then-booming industrial city, where Antonio could easily find work as a skilled mason. The birth of three more sons [names] set Antonio firmly on a path toward a family construction business: Antonio Federici & Sons.

But first-born Gaetano appears to have had early aspirations to the fine arts, with a nascent skill and passion for sculpture that was immediately recognized by his schoolteachers. Family lore hints that Teresa championed his artistic training despite Antonio's resistance, and in a personal narrative faintly reminiscent of a Renaissance biography, the gifted young Gaetano soon found his talent lionized in Paterson's exhibits at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition of 1900-1901 [note]. In this heyday of the classical revival "City Beautiful" movement, his gift appears to have been saleable. He was soon apprenticed to some of the premier classical sculptors of the day: Karl Bitter and Charles Niehaus, who had studios in New York City, and Giuseppe Moretti, who worked with Bitter and was an emerging leading light in public sculpture among Italians recently migrated to the US. [note]

This convergence of talent and opportunity also created a working bond for a time between the young Federici and his father's firm, which had by 1903 entered a partnership with Roman-born architect, Adriano Armezzani (Armezzani, Federici & Sons), to construct St. Stephen's Magyar RC Church in nearby Passaic.[note] That year, Moretti joined with the firm to produce a spectacular entry to the St Louis Exposition of 1904 on behalf of the city of Birmingham (AL): a 55' high statue of Vulcan, a torch in his extended right arm, designed to celebrate and promote the city's contributions to the American iron industry.[note] Contemporary photos show the unfinished monument still in production within the unfinished church shell, the Federicis and other workmen gathered around it. [photo exhibits] Transporting the statue in pieces to Birmingham by train only added to the monumental challenges met by these ambitious entreprenuers, who cast it in iron there and then transported it again to be assembled in St Louis [note?].

The statue (and the achievement it represented) not only won Moretti and his team an award; it brought the entire Federici-Moretti operation into contact with many contemporary movers and shakers in the interactive worlds of industry and the arts represented by these immense "Expositions" and "World's Fairs" of the time. [note]

It also sealed an ongoing collaboration between the Federicis and Moretti that eventually resulted in a major collaboration on the decorative work for the Centro Gallego in Havana in 1914. [note]

FEDERICI AS PATERSON MASTER Federici came of age at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of exuberant civic pride and virtual "monument madness"--in Paterson no less than elsewhere. Already championed and employed by such active widely-known public sculptors as Karl Bitter and Giuseppe Moretti, he was enabled to launch his career celebrating several popular figures of his time who happened also to be from Paterson. He was barely 20 when he entered the public competition to memorialize favorite son Garret Augustus Hobart, William McKinley's first Vice President, a commission that called for a super-life-sized monument before Paterson's City Hall. Federici did not win that commission [photos of F's competition model and of winning statue by .... before a City Hall newly reconstructed after the fire of 1903; and note]. But he did succeed in further attracting the attention of the Paterson cognoscenti to his talent. In 1905, the County awarded him a contract to memorialize Congressman James Stewart [dates]. His remarkable achievement for a 25-year-old local artist made front-page news [photo and note].

The Stewart bronze still stands before the County Court House on Hamilton Street, his arm raised in a rhetorical flourish very reminiscent of the dramatic raised arm of Moretti's Vulcan [photo, and note, with possible mention of this as a notable sculptural achievement in itself, like the sculptural smile, another of Federici's conquests].

[more to come]