Antonio Sciortino won first prize in an international competition to sculpt a monument in honour of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko in 1914.

In 1914, the committee in Kyiv, capital city of Ukraine, responsible for the erection of the monument to Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko, had decided to award the first prize to Maltese sculptor Antonio Sciortino.

This was an international competition, and the 35-year-old sculptor must certainly have been overjoyed with this success because he had outclassed renown­ed Russian sculptors such as Sergei Mickhailovich Volnuhin, Nikolay Andreyev and Leonid Vladimirovich Sherwood, apart artists from Ukraine, such as Mikhael Gavrilko.

Sciortino had also achieved international status, and his model would appear in the major art journals of England (The Studio) and Italy (La cultura moderna). In Kyiv itself, postcards with the illustration of his winning model were printed, one of which Sciortino sent to his sister, right from Ukraine’s capital. There was also the substantial prize money which amounted to 150,000 roubles.

The national poet of Ukraine, Shevchenko, is portrayed seated in a pensive mood on an unidentified structure, probably a tree trunk. Beneath, a group of figures represent the people of Ukraine with the typical regional landscape in the background. The female figure represents Kateryna, the Ukrainian woman who had been seduced by a Russian soldier and abandoned with her child, and who had become a symbol of Ukraine, being held captive by the Tsarist regime.

Shevchenko himself had composed a ballad about this girl and had executed a painting on this subject. Sciortino represented Kateryna in a dignified posture: standing and wearing a long gown with a very long train, while she is cared for by her companion who embraces her while holding a small child. He symbolises the Ukrainian people.

Shevchenko was born in 1814 in Moryntsi, a village not far from Kyiv, in a family of poor serf peasants. When his mother died in 1823, his father married a widow who treated the boy cruelly. After his father’s death the young Shevchenko did odd jobs as a serving boy. By then his master, Paulo Engelhardt, realising the young man’s talent at painting, sent Taras to art courses at St Petersburg.

There, he met various painters, the foremost among whom was Karl Bryllov. The latter, by the proceeds of the lottery prize of one of his portraits, bought Taras his freedom.

Meanwhile, Shevchenko wrote poems in the Ukrainian language, thus promoting his native tongue during a period in the 19th century when it was dangerous to do so, because the Ukrainians’ desire for independence was barbarously repressed, which also included the suppression of the printing and publishing of literary works in the Ukrainian language.

Slowly but steadily, Shev­chenko, by virtue of his paintings and poetry, was becoming the symbol of Ukrainian identity, and a beacon to all compatriots. No wonder that, after befriending a clandestine organisation, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a poem written by him ended up in the hands of Tsar Nicholas I.

WWI broke out exactly at that time, and the project was shelved

This writing not only criticised the tsar’s actions, but also mocked his wife’s old-fashioned attire and characteristics. Shevchenko was thus arrested, convicted and exiled to a remote outpost in Orsk, in the Ural Mountains. He was forced to march from St Petersburg to Orsk with the order not to be given pencil or brush and colours so as not allow him to write or paint.

Sometime before he died, he wrote a poem entitled My Testament. The first stanza is being quoted here because Sciortino had certainly read it and was inspired to place the figure of Shevchenko on raised ground:

When I am dead, bury me

In my beloved Ukraine,

My tomb upon a grave mound high

Amid the spreading plain,

So that the field, the boundless steppes,

The Dnieper’s plunging shore

My eyes could see, my ears could hear

The mighty river roar.

The third stanza is indicative of the poet’s heartfelt appeal to the Ukrainians to stand up for their rights:

Oh bury me, then rise ye up

And break your heavy chains

And water with the tyrants’ blood

The freedom you have gained.

And in the great new family,

The family of the free,

With softly spoken, kindly word

Remember also me.

The suffering evinced in this stanza inspired also one other model of the monument that Sciortino submitted in the earlier competitions. (It is good to keep in mind that in all there were four competitions, starting from 1910 up through 1914.)

Sciortino took part for sure in the 1910 competition, because in a letter dated June 5, 1910, to the Irish art gallerist Hugh Lane, he expressed his satisfaction at hearing that his model had been chosen alongside another two, from among those of the 64 participants. He also assumed that he would be receiving some type of prize (an incentive, maybe?).

Luckily, some years ago, two photos of this model resurfaced in a private collection belonging to Samuel Bugeja, and subsequently published (see Gerald Bugeja, Antonio Sciortino, The Lost Album, 2015, Malta, Kite Publications, pp.169-70).

From the stylistic aspect, this early model shows the influence of Rodin, and contrasts with the winning entry, which transmitted the sweeter (but powerful) Italian style of Leonardo Bistolfi.

Art historian L. Popova, who researched the competition’s documents (in the wake of the commemorations celebrating the 150th anniversary of poet’s birth) and published in Russian a long and interesting study of these competitions in Iskutssvo in 1979 (an English translation by Liuva Sheina can be read in The Lost Album), reports that the jury had opted for Voklnuhin’s model, while the committee chose Sciortino’s.

But this could be more the fruit of some bias on the part of the jury, who viewed anything stemming from the West – and Sciortino was associated with the West – as an object of distrust and mediocrity. Popova herself seems to be a victim of this prejudice, as can be detected from her comments.

So Sciortino not only had to outshine the other competitors, but also overcome not a few prejudices; his success, therefore, justly redounds to his artistic talent.

It was, however, the Maltese sculptor’s bad luck that World War I broke out exactly at that time, and the project of a monu­ment to Shevchenko based on Sciortino’s model was shelved, never to materia­lise. Another stroke of misfortune regarding the destiny of the model of the monument.

Popova states that the sketches and projects of the competition, including, one assumes, that of the winning model by Sciortino, which were kept before the Revolution in the Kiev Museum of Art and Industry, were lost.

Given the ordeal Ukraine is being tragically subjected to at present, it would be most fitting should the Maltese authorities see to it that the winning model is reconstructed on the basis of these photos and kept and treasured at MUŻA – this being the acme of Antonio Sciortino’s artistic career and international recognition; something which would not be repeated.

A copy should also be donated to Ukraine, hopefully in the near future when the war is over, as a testimony of the sympathy and solidarity of the Maltese with the people of Ukraine.