“Emma’s Angel shines with androgynous beauty. It exudes an intriguing and mysterious aura. She barely touches the water with her feet, with a light dance step, but together she appears powerful, full of vital energy.”
The Angel of Waters on the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is one of New York’s icons and the absolute most photographed monument by tourists and mentioned in films. This book reveals for the first time its fascinating and mysterious history, which is inseparable from that of the artist who created it 150 years ago: Emma Stebbins, the first woman to receive a commission for a public artwork in New York City. A native New Yorker, Emma lived, however, in the Rome of the Popes from 1856 to 1870, and it was in Italy that she was inspired for the Angel statue and created it. Her life is special, especially for those times: she is “married” to actress Charlotte Cushman, a forerunner of the struggle for the recognition of gay rights; and she is part of that “strange sisterhood of American women sculptors who had settled on the seven hills like a marble flock (or flock),” is how writer Henry James describes them. Shy and reserved, Emma left very few traces of herself. To reconstruct her life and that of the Angel, Maria Teresa Cometto has done painstaking research between New York and Rome, managing to speak with two of the sculptor’s descendants. The result is also a portrait of the two cities and sheds light on the red thread that linked Americans and progressive Italians of those years: the anti-slavery movement in the US and the Risorgimento in Italy. (Source IBS.co.uk)
Maria Teresa Cometto has lived in New York since 2000 from where she writes for Corriere della Sera and Grazia. In addition to working as a journalist for more than 30 years, she has written several books including La Marchesa Colombi. Corriere della Sera’s first journalist. She is also coauthor of Sons & Money and Tech and the City.
