Victims of Labour – a memorial that broke the mould
Artists were among the many to draw inspiration from the opening of the Gotthard railway tunnel 140 years ago. Prominent Ticino sculptor Vincenzo Vela created a contemporaneous memorial to those lost during its construction, entitled Victims of Labour. This key work was not particularly well received at the time, however.
Barbara Basting
Barbara Basting worked as a cultural editor and currently heads the visual arts division in the City of Zurich’s Culture Department.
Scarcely known at the time, Zurich sculptor Richard Kissling (1848-1919) showed his sculpture of Alfred Escher, the driving force behind the tunnel through the Alps, which had opened the year before, in 1882. Kissling's plaster model earned him the 1884 commission to create the monumental Alfred Escher Fountain, which stands to this day in front of the main railway station in Zurich. Alongside his plaster model of Escher, Kissling presented a group of figures that he called Zeitgeist, his proposal for a Gotthard memorial. The sculpture consists of a naked male figure, sitting on a winged rail car and looking ahead with an enthusiastically outstretched arm. Muscular workers toil in a crouched position to his right and left. Zeitgeist has crowned the arched gateway in front of Lucerne station since 1907.
While Vela also references historical traditions in art, he reinterprets them. For example, he cites the death of Greek hero Meleager, a frequent motif on Roman sarcophagi, and often used since the early Renaissance on Christian depictions of the deceased being carried to their grave. The victim's trailing arm, the braccio pendente, is recognisable in particular as classical iconography. At the same time, unlike Kissling, Vela's workers and their suffering are the actual subject of the piece. The artist seems to anticipate a line from Bertolt Brecht's famous poem, Questions from a Worker Who Reads: ‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’ Not the king, but thousands of workers.
Primary responsibility for this lay with engineer and businessman Louis Favre, from Western Switzerland. When bidding to build the tunnel, Favre had undercut his competitors, thereby securing himself the contract. Favre himself died of heart failure when viewing the tunnel in 1879, not long before the north-south breakthrough.
Born in 1820 in Ligornetto, by the time of his invitation to the National Exhibition, Vincenzo Vela had become one of the most important sculptors of the 19th century both at home and abroad. He distanced himself increasingly from the classical style that was still popular in his youth, turning instead to the more realistic depiction of the human body in the Italian verismo movement. Today Vela is recognised among its principal practitioners. Verismo prepared the way for modern sculpture from Rodin onwards.
Vela gave up teaching that same year to withdraw home to Ligornetto, where he fitted out his villa with a studio and a private museum. His work gives countless clues that he was a reformer and a politically astute man of his age. In addition to Spartacus he created a monument in Como to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian freedom fighter of the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy. Vela, who also served for a time on the Grand Council of Ticino, left his villa and all the art it contains – including numerous plaster models of his famous sculptures – to the Swiss Confederation. The plaster model of Victims of Labour occupies a prominent position in what is now a museum, still run by the state.
That is hardly surprising. After its exhibition in Zurich in 1883, Victims of Labour was suddenly everywhere. Magazines and newspapers printed reproductions and Vela himself, an experienced self-publicist, put out a photograph of the model. From 1904 onwards the work regularly featured in school textbooks in Ticino, and it made an appearance in a book on the history of the canton of Zurich as late as 2009.
A prophet in his own land
Despite acclaim for the plaster model, at first nobody in Switzerland wanted to make a bronze cast of it, and initiatives to that effect failed to attract sufficient support. Opinion did not change until the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the tunnel's opening, in 1932. With the support of the Federal Council and the Federal Arts Commission, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) was now interested in Vela's memorial, putting up a total of 30,000 Swiss francs (around 250,000 in today's prices) for the cast. After a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing, the work was finally placed in front of the railway station in Airolo.
Hardly anyone saw it there, however. Those travelling to and from Italy rarely get off the train in Airolo, and the monument was popular in the main only as a postcard image, for example. In 1955 it was even mentioned in an advertisement for the chocolate malt drink Ovomaltine. With the NEAT project for a new railway link through the Alps even the old tunnel itself has lost importance.
With this in mind it is worth taking a fresh look at Vincenzo Vela’s Victims of Labour, especially in comparison with Richard Kissling’s Alfred Escher Fountain in Zurich and his Zeitgeist sculpture in Lucerne. Unlike much of the overblown allegory of the 19th century, Vela's work has aged well. As art historian Gian Casper Bott might suggest, it could even be seen as input to the current discourse on memorials. Vela delivers the counterpoint to the Escher monument, not least because the Escher family's colonial connections have since cast doubt over the man once hailed as the hero of a progressive Switzerland.
It is more than that, however. Seen through the lens of Vela's entire oeuvre, Victims of Labour can be regarded as a critical – even self-critical – commentary of the ageing artist on his century's excessive fondness for the memorial. Thematically, the relief ties in with the Spartacus of his earlier years, to which his brilliant career owed so much.
