Designed by Italo Lupi and entrusted to most important of Medardo Rosso, the volume takes stock of the complex relationship between the innovative Turin artist and the practice of copying from the antique.

The catalogue accompanies an exhibition that grew out of the desire to explore a little investigated aspect of Rosso’s art, offering the opportunity to present a diversified selection of sculptural and photographic works that document the artist’s whole career but also offer a broad reflection on sculpture and the practice of the copy from antiquity between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The choice to order Medardo Rosso’s works by themes brings out the innovative vocabulary of this fascinating artist, who exerted an original and fruitful influence on twentieth-century art. As with some great painters and sculptors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (in particular Degas and Brancusi), Rosso’s photographs not only possess a documentary value but are the opportunity for a study of matter and light, now released from the comparison with life.

The essays by Francesco Stocchi, Paola Zatti, Charlotte Schreiter and Paola Mola bring out the continuous experimentation that characterised the artist’s works as well as his ties to ancient sculpture, taking the form of over twenty-five copies made from the antique and seen as an essential step in an evolutionary process.