The statue would represent the state at the 1904 World’s Fair, held in St. In 1903, the Commercial Club of Birmingham (forerunner of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce) sought out Moretti to sculpt a statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking, as a symbol of Birmingham’s origins in the iron and steel industry. During this time, Moretti, an amateur opera singer, joined the Liederkranz music club and befriended legendary opera singer Enrico Caruso. Famed architect Richard Morris Hunt hired him for commissions in Newport, Rhode Island, and he received several large commissions for the Pittsburgh city park system in Pennsylvania in the 1890s. With artist Carl Bitter, Moretti bought a building for his studio and slowly began to prosper. He set up a studio in New York and began accepting commissions. After being injured in a severe earthquake in Croatia and also losing his first wife, in 1883 Moretti applied to come to the United States for new opportunities, finally arriving in 1888. Although Moretti cast many sculptures in bronze, using the lost-wax method, his favorite medium was marble, and he constantly searched for new sources of this highly workable stone. After his training, he established himself in studios in Italy Agram (now Zagreb), Croatia and Budapest, Hungary. Moretti was born on February 3, 1857, in Siena, Italy, and trained under master sculptors in Siena and Florence from the age of nine until seventeen. Giuseppe Moretti (1857-1935), an Italian-born classical sculptor, made an extraordinary impact on the state of Alabama through his design and execution of Birmingham’s 56-foot iron statue of Vulcan and his promotion of Alabama marble as a medium for fine sculpture.
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