This funerary monument, which was made in 1890, had been commissioned by Enrico Amerigo’s sisters in memory of their brother. Enrico Amerigo, a meritorious citizen, has been the administrator and a benefactor of the Institute for the Blind and of other charitable works, and, on his death, he left an important inheritance to the kindergartens. The sculptor has devised a monument able to express both virtue and benevolence, and, at the same time, the beneficiaries’ gratitude, by representing symbolically the two institutions which have received the most important donations from the deceased; beside the pedestal on which the sculptor set the deceased’s bust he placed, on the left, the figure of an old blind man, kneeling down and leaning on a stick; on the right he placed the figure of a young orphan girl, recognizable as such by her kindergarten uniform, portrayed in the act of making the sign of the cross. This work belongs to the Realism, a trend which was typical during the 1880s and 1890s, according to which the orphans, the poor, the sick and all those who benefited from somebody’s generosity had to be portrayed in a concrete fashion.
