When you think that you have fully adjusted, you realize that the level of the pole has risen again and, therefore, whether we like it or not, you have to recalibrate the balance and imagine different possibilities.
Being inspired by unusual areas is the basis of the ability to evolve, preparing to contain new opportunities to look at everyday life with different eyes.
It is from this consideration that the reading of Emma and the Angel of Central Park by Maria Teresa Cometto represents a real source of inspiration.
Angel of the Waters is a symbol of love, harmony, healing and rebirth, as stated in the historical motivation of her creation. The angel has been on the Bethesda Fountain since May 31, 1873, and is a New York City icon by Emma Stebbins.
Emma Stebbins was the first woman to be appointed to a public opera in New York; she was a woman, but above all she was good, very good.
And it doesn’t matter if his brother Henry G. Stebbins, one of the promoters of the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1870, one of the “Founding Fathers of the City”, was one of the commissioners who decided the works in the park, Because his talent was unquestionable and no other member of the committee protested the assignment.
This statement is confirmed by the fact that Stebbins creates many other works that testify to his value and his art: The Lotus Eater, Industry and Commerce, the bust of Charlotte Cushman, immense actress and her companion for a lifetime, works on display in 1860 by Goupil, the prestigious art gallery founded in Paris and opened in New York since 1848; the Columbus in Brooklyn; the statue of Horace Mann in Boston.
The inspiration for Angel of Waters came to Emma in Rome, the place to stay in between the Fifties and Seventies of the Nineteenth century, until the Breach of Porta Pia, date when the place to be became Paris. Emma is one of the protagonists of a sisterhood of American female sculptors who had settled in the Eternal City, to breathe the ideal of beauty that the city radiates, drawing on the canons of Neoclassicism as the style of inspiration of the young American Republic.
It’s a story for the first time, Central Park is the nation’s first urban public park, with obvious educational intent, Stebbins one of the first women to receive public works assignments in America, Cushman was the first woman to be named after a public girls’ school in Boston.
It is a story of passion and dedication, of courage and independence, made up of meetings that allow you to grow and proceed towards your own personal improvement and unexpected events that force you to start again, not always from the beginning.
From today Emma and Charlotte will keep me company and I will try to animate with the same spirit of modernity every activity in which I will have the pleasure to participate.