Valerio Villareale, Baccante danzante, 1838, marble
In the same years the dynamic with the dances of the Bacchante (1838) by Valerio Villareale, master and initiator of a Palermo sculpture school in the first half of the nineteenth century, arrives at the Museum. Villareale studied classic and modern models and thanks to them he had great recognition in Rome in the circle of Canova and then in Caserta, where he had directed the historiated decoration for the Sala di Marte for Gioacchino Murat.
Antonio Ugo, U Carusu, (Bimbo con pala), 1895, plaster
Furthermore, the great sculptor Antonio Ugo donates to the Museum a nucleus of forty works, which deal with themes from social realism to classicism up to the twentieth-century plastic synthesis: from the work Rosa e thorns, which testifies to his collaboration with the architect Basile and the furniture and decoration company Ducrot, in plaster U Carusu, a little boy resting from hard work, which in reference to the cycle of “I Vinti” by Giovanni Verga.
Last but not least, the great sculptor Ettore Ximenes, represented at the GAM by Ecce mater, characterized by the solemn and almost dramatic elegance of the gesture combined with the naturalness of the movement of the child who seems to want to squeeze his mother’s face, using it as a support for take the first steps on the balustrade.