Antonio Corsi

This set of pictures are of Antonio Corsi

Documentary Summary "I prefer to act my parts on a painter’s platform. The actor dies and is forgotten.
I live for hundreds of years – maybe thousands – in the famous paintings in which I appear."
Antonio Corsi – 1912

In 1924, Los Angeles Times writer Carl Clausen said, "To be the original of scores of masterpieces, to be the inspiration of masters and the friend of the great ones of the earth is more than a distinction. Such is the good fortune of Antonio Corsi, the world’s most famous living artist’s model." Corsi’s face and figure was painted, sketched and sculpted by the likes of such great artists as John Singer Sargent, Pierre Auguste Cot and James Earle Fraser. There are statues and reliefs of Corsi found in New York’s Battery Park, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Pauls Cathedral in London, and countless other locations around the globe. The first series of Pygmalion paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, which Corsi posed for, is currently in the collection of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The New York Times commented, "In [the] sculpture by the Princess [Louise] of ‘The Crucifixion’ and in representations of the same subject by painters, Corsi accomplished what was perhaps his finest and most pre-eminent work as a model… As elsewhere in his long career, the excellence of achievement was largely due to his imaginative concentration."

"I live, I breathe, I feel all of the emotions of the characters I assume.
When I posed for the Crucifixion I lived over again the anguish and suffering of Jesus."
Antonio Corsi – 1922

Corsi died 1924 at the age of 56. An opportunistic silent film actress liquidated his assets. The following decades saw Corsi’s legacy slip into obscurity. Corsi, through energetic self-archiving, marked own his place in history. He not only lent his image to famous works of art that will survive hundreds of years, but kept a record of his own life in hundreds of recently rediscovered photographs and documents. Over the course of 8 years of research, filmmakers Jake and Tracey Gorst have reconstructed Corsi's life history.
Mainspring Pictures is proud to introduce the life and work of this ingenious artist’s model to the public in a new feature documentary. Learning about the life of Corsi will encourage the world to take a fresh look at the works of Sargent, Abbey and many others. By discovering 

A FORGOTTEN FACE

IN FAMOUS PAINTINGS

On a recent misty morning rain droplets formed a mournful coating on a bronze statue of an American Indian on horseback in the yard of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cyrus E. Dallin, the sculptor of the 1909 artwork titled “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” created a figure beseeching the heavens with muscular arms.

Antonio Corsi, the professional model who posed for Dallin, was a charismatic Italian immigrant, famous in his day for endurance and versatility.

He stood in contorted positions for hours before artists as renowned as Edward Burne-Jones and John Singer Sargent. Corsi, with his long nose and knack for tragic expressions, could portray characters as diverse as fortunetellers, monks, knights, Puritans and pharaohs.

But Corsi’s name does not appear on the statue’s plaque. In fact, he has almost entirely fallen into obscurity.

“We really don’t, when we study art history, learn anything about the models,” said Heather Leavell, a chairwoman of the Cyrus E. Dallin Art Museum in Arlington, Mass.

She has been learning about Corsi from the husband-and-wife filmmakers Jake and Tracey Gorst, who (with the executive producers Charles and Tina Miller) are interviewing his descendants and tracking down archival materials for a documentary, “Corsi: Prince of Models.” “It’s like all roads lead to Corsi,” Ms. Gorst said during a recent tour of Lower Manhattan, looking for his likeness on building facades. She found it on the Custom House and Surrogate’s Courthouse, with outfits and props resembling pieces in his huge collection.

“Corsi often wears one of his historic costumes when he receives his guests at his studio,” a magazine reporter observed in 1908, after visiting his Greenwich Village home, cluttered with clothing.

Corsi’s chameleonlike talent, or so he told reporters, was discovered when he was a child. Around 1880 his impoverished family, natives of a hilltop town in central Italy, moved to England and became street musicians. The British painter Felix Moscheles noticed the boy’s outgoing personality and piercing eyes and hired him as a model. That connection led to jobs posing for the Pre-Raphaelite circle and even for Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise.

Princess Louise would hold a cigarette to his lips when his limbs started to ache. “This kept me from disturbing the pose,” he told the magazine interviewer in 1908.

By 1901 Sargent had taken him to New York. (Corsi’s wife, Kathryn, and their three children eventually followed.) He posed for prominent illustrators and muralists, including Edwin Blashfield and Howard Chandler Christy, and for art classes. At his peak he was making today’s equivalent of about $3,000 a week, Mr. Gorst said.

Norman Rockwell was among the teenage students at Corsi’s school sessions. “He would bring his large leather-bound scrapbook to school and, gathering us around him with an imperious wave of his hand, show us photographs of the famous paintings he had posed for,” Rockwell wrote in a 1960 memoir.

In 1912 Corsi reinvented himself as a screen actor in Los Angeles. He took small roles in about 30 now-obscure silent movies like “False Women” and “The Crucifix of Destiny.” He died in 1924, at 56, and an actress acquaintance immediately sold off his collections.

The Gorsts have found fragments of film footage and some of Corsi’s possessions. Paul Rickert, an archivist in Syracuse, owns a batch of Corsi photos, and correspondence has turned up from artist clients and a famous actress who perhaps had an affair with Corsi. (The Gorsts will not yet reveal her name.)

The filmmakers keep leafing through scholarly studies of his clients, hoping to find his name. They are also exploring sites where he is portrayed on the walls, including the New Amsterdam Theater in Manhattan.

Plaster models of Corsi used to appear in Eskimo dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. “This was his least favorite posing job, ever,” Mr. Gorst wrote in an e-mail. “He said the costumes (provided by the museum) were hot and smelly, and he had to pose for an exceptionally long time.”