Reign of Gesso

Article by Chiara Vanzetto from “Corriere della Sera,” courtesy of Chiara Bernazzani.

Venus di Milo in the living room?

No, better yet a tondo by Michelangelo. Perhaps even a head by Canova, or a frieze from the Parthenon…Not pieces from a museum, obviously, but perfect copies of them: finely crafted plaster casts, with details finished by hand, made with snow white plaster from 19th century molds preserved to this day. Crowded on the shelves and walls, these sculptures tell a story of more than a century: that of the plaster cast company, Fumagalli & Dossi, the historic workshop in the Paolo Sarpi zone.

“The workshop has been here since the early nineteen-hundreds, though its difficult to establish an exact date” says Mario Dossi (pictured in the slideshow), co-owner with Roberto Fumagalli of the company, the last of its kind in Milan. A solid date of 1927 is when the publishing house of Antonio Vallardi closed its factory of artistic plasterwork. Two workers, Gariboldi and Bertolazzi, on their own, collected many of the molds that date back to a still previous collection, that of the nineteenth century Museo Campi di via Brera.

“From that extraordinary heritage we have 427 original examples from which we still work – continuing with the present heirs of those two founders – We work a great deal with art schools, but there is no shortage of private clients. Even though we are in period somewhat critical of this work.”

There remain only three of us who know the secrets of reproduction in plaster: the two partners and a colleague, who alternate between the workshops in Milan and the more recent one in Mezzago. Here, Renaissance busts and Romanesque forms, Corinthian capitals and bas reliefs, Classical and Baroque statues are recreated. And if someone wants to learn this trade? “It takes passion. The manual ability can be learned but not a love of art.”