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William Tucker in the November issue of the Royal Academy of Art Magazine.

The sculptor William Tucker RA has been captivated by the work of Rodin and Matisse through his career. Here he argues that some of the two artists’ most famous works were inspired by the same man’s body.

In his Notes of a Painter (1908), his first public statement about his art, Henri Matisse wrote: ‘What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is that which best permits me to express my so-to-speak religious feelings about life. I do not insist on all the details of the face, on setting them down one-by-one with anatomical exactitude. If I have an Italian model who at first appearance suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, I nevertheless discover his essential qualities, I discover among the lines of the face those which suggest the deep gravity that persists in every human being.’

Matisse did indeed have such an Italian model, who posed during several hundred sessions over a three-year period for his first sculpture of the figure, Le Serf (1900-03; page 70). He first encountered the model in the atelier of the painter Eugène Carrière in early 1900. In Matisse’s painting of that year, Male Model (opposite right), his pose is remarkably similar to that of Auguste Rodin’s St John the Baptist (1878-80; opposite below), except for the sculpture’s gesture. The model, a man in his fifties, made no secret of the fact that 20 years earlier it was he (opposite top left) who had posed for St John the Baptist. He went by the name ‘Bevilaqua’ but his real name was César Pignatelli. The little that is known of his improbable career comes from three sources: Rodin’s reflections on art, Entretiens avec Rodin, published in 1913; Les modèles d’artistes. Paris 1926, by the journalist Denise Moran; and the records of his birthplace, Gallinaro.

Gallinaro is a small town in the province of Frosinone, in the Lazio region of Italy. It is 68 miles east of Rome, and, travelling by foot on paved roads, is about 950 miles to Paris. The names of three men from Gallinaro are recorded as working as artist’s models in Paris in the late 1800s: Cesidio (César) Pignatelli, born in Gallinaro in 1846; his son Luigi (Louis) Pignatelli, born in 1869; and Domenico Bevilaqua, perhaps a cousin of the Pignatellis, born in 1878. Denise Moran discovered César Pignatelli in 1926 when he was living with his family in the Plaisance district of Montparnasse, which she describes as ‘an Italy without sunlight’ where the inhabitants spoke a language ‘that was certainly not Italian, but which refused after thirty or forty years in Paris, to become French’. ‘With his white beard, his slow hands with swollen veins, César Pignatelli is so dignified and peaceful that one cannot look at him without emotion. He is 80 years old. In the 27 months since he became ill, he has not left his room. He lives with his glory, in the form of a small painting, his portrait in the pose of Rodin’s St John the Baptist, which he posed for’.

The old man does not speak to Moran, but his family members, especially his son Louis, give an account of how César left Italy in 1877 with his wife, two children, aged seven and three, and a newborn. ‘They went on foot, pushing a handcart. In the villages, they stopped. The father played the accordion, the children danced. They slept in stables. In three months they reached Paris. César could not find work there, so they had to take the road again. Still pushing the cart, they arrived one day at a great city, perhaps Marseille, or was it Bordeaux? They had left Paris by the wrong gate! Finally they reached their home town, Gallinaro, near Montecassino. The baby had died at Castres.’

The following spring Pignatelli and his family set out again for Paris. This time he was in luck: an artist noticed his expressive features and made the introduction to Rodin. In addition to St John the Baptist he would pose for works such as The Kiss and, with his son Louis, The Gates of Hell. Later he posed as the dying Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in the 1892 painting of the sculptor by Albert Maignan. He also posed for Jean-Paul Laurens, Alexandre Falguière and Emmanuel Frémiet, and as Jules Dalou’s Bacchus. The Pignatellis ‘posed at the Beaux Arts, in studios, and for the Prix de Rome,’ writes Moran. ‘They posed for so many famous works, an incalculable number. For some artists, they were the only models they ever used, modestly collaborating by providing the required expression.’ Rodin, in an interview a few years before his death, spoke about Pignatelli, though he does not identify him by name. Rodin recalled how a certain peasant newly arrived from Italy knocked at the studio door and offered himself as a model. ‘Seeing him, I was seized with admiration: that rough, hairy man expressed violence in his bearing and physical strength, yet also all the mystical character of his race. I thought immediately of St John the Baptist; that is, a man of nature, a visionary, a believer, a forerunner come to announce one greater than himself.

‘The peasant undressed, mounted the model stand as if he had never posed; he planted himself, head up, torso straight, at the same time supported on his two legs opened like a compass. The movement was so right, so determined and so true that I cried: ‘But it’s a walking man!’ I immediately resolved to make what I had seen… It was thus that I made The Walking Man and St John the Baptist. I only copied the model whom chance had sent me.’ It was two years before St John the Baptist was ready for exhibition. Rodin had determined it should be over life size, in order to avoid the accusations of life-casting that had been made against his first figure to be accepted by the Salon, The Age of Bronze (1875-77). And rather than ‘copying’ his model, Rodin took apart the elements of the figure and extensively reworked them. The head by itself was exhibited at the Salon of 1879 and the whole figure in plaster at the Salon of 1880: critics found it ‘strange’, ‘primitive’, and remarked that the model ‘must have been the worst-built man in the world’. In fact the photo of Pignatelli in the Baptist pose (page 67) shows not only how Rodin had transformed his physique – for example, in the creation a more muscular upper body – but that the posture of the sculpture, set on an uneven base, is itself is anatomically impossible for a man standing on level ground. Pignatelli continued to pose for Rodin over the next decade. In Rodin’s studio he was called ‘the wolf ’: he was ‘Rodin’s Model’ for the growing number of artists with Salon ambitions, including Rodin’s rivals, who began to employ him themselves. He clearly found his new profession of modelling, which involved standing or sitting still for hours, was preferable to pushing a loaded handcart in his mountainous native region. Ever the performer, he could play the role of the triumphant Augustus Caesar or the dying Carpeaux, but probably found confusing Rodin’s instructions to the models in his studio ‘to do what they wanted’, in the artist’s words, while he observed their movements from the corner of his eye, ‘putting down their poses as they are in nature’.

He may have found it humiliating to have to shave his beard and trim his hair to pose nude for The Gates of Hell as Ugolino, on his hands and knees over his son’s body (1881; page 69), at intervals as Louis grew from childhood into adolescence. Inevitably the time came when Rodin’s resentment  of ‘his’ model’s successful career posing in other studios boiled over. ‘For the rest, my model was a dreadful creature, capable of cruelty; he had the refined wickedness of a civilised being and the deceitfulness of a savage; his eyes shone with the brilliance of a wild beast’s in the nighttime, and when he laughed one would have said it was a wolf,’ Rodin would recall. Whatever provoked it, this astonishing change of heart by Rodin, after more than ten years of their work together, would have signalled the end of Pignatelli’s career. Pignatelli turned 50 in 1896, already old for a model: it’s hardly surprising that he decided to reinvent himself. He adopted the surname of the young Domenico Bevilaqua, who had recently arrived from Gallinaro, possibly invited by César, certainly drawn to Paris by his and Louis’ reputation. At the same time César made no secret of the fact that he had been the model for Rodin’s St John the Baptist when Matisse encountered him in the atelier of Eugène Carrière, Rodin’s friend and admirer, early in 1900. Rodin’s famous exhibition at the Place d’Alma opened in the summer of 1900. Among the 165 sculptures were the colossal plaster of The Gates of Hell and the half-length study for St John the Baptist (later called The Walking Man) both exhibited for the first time. Matisse had an uncomfortable meeting with Rodin, which confirmed his decision to keep his distance and study Rodin’s sculpture through Rodin’s model, in his own studio. Bevilaqua posed for The Serf in an estimated 300 to 500 sessions over the next three years. Matisse reported that he spent half his father’s allowance on model fees alone; unable to sell any paintings he wondered if he and Albert Marquet could at least get a refund of their entry fee if their paintings fell off Bevilaqua’s handcart en route to the Salon des Indépendents exhibition.

Matisse built the armature for The Serf in the atelier of Rodin’s chief assistant, Antoine Bourdelle, and one imagines the cart and the model’s assistance would also have been helpful in moving the wrapped clay figure the mile-and-a-quarter from Bourdelle’s academy, then up the 102 stone steps to Matisse’s fifth-floor studio on Quai Saint-Michel with its view of Notre-Dame across the river. Matisse’s last session with Bevilaqua for The Serf was in August 1903. The clay figure, lacking arms, was cast in plaster by the following spring and exhibited that autumn. It was not until 1908 when it was cast in bronze, thanks to the patronage of Sarah Stein, whose encouragement and commitment had transformed Matisse’s financial situation. There’s a photo of Bevilaqua (page 69), his head crowned with a laurel wreath, posing for Matisse, with Sarah Stein and other students in the ‘Académie Matisse’ that she helped to organise. Stein bought that first cast of The Serf. The sculpture remained unique in Matisse’s oeuvre – those that followed, with the exception of the Crucifix in the Vence Chapel, all represent the female body. The Serf is also one of the most ambitious of Matisse’s sculptures, the second largest of his free-standing works. Pignatelli continued to model, probably under his own name. His son Louis was at the height of his career, posing for fashionable artists such as Hubert-Denis Etcheverry. He had married the daughter of a model; they had three sons who all were to work as models. Then the war came and, as Moran wrote, ‘the inactive profession of modelling is not enough to make a living. They have abandoned it.’ But the old man was still working well into his seventies. In our last view of him he is still John the Baptist, still the very image of endurance on those heroic legs.

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William Tucker RA is a sculptor. His work is held in collections including the Tate, London, and the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York. His writing includes The Language of Sculpture (Thames & Hudson)