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Zumbo [Zummo], Gaetano (Giulio)
(b Syracuse, 1656; d Paris, 22 Dec 1701). Italian sculptor, active also in France. He was born of a noble family named Zummo (he changed the spelling to Zumbo in Paris) and educated for the church. Zumbo was a wax sculptor and anatomical modeller and, like many late 16th- and 17th-century amateurs who practised the art of wax modelling, was probably self-taught, although he may have learnt something of the technique in Sicily, where wax imagery was popular. Before 1691 he went to Naples and visited Rome and other cities in Italy. He was an enthusiastic collector of Old Master drawings and engravings. In Naples he may have invented a new method of colouring wax for sculpture (see WAX, §II, 1(i)), which attracted sufficient notice for him to be summoned to Florence in 1691 by Cosimo de’ Medici III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who paid him a monthly pension. As a sample of his skill he may have brought with him a scene with wax figures, the Plague (Florence, Mus. Zool. La Specola), which has been shown to depend on paintings of the Neapolitan plague of 1656 by Mattia Preti and Micco Spadaro. Zumbo was in Florence from February 1691 at least until April 1694. For Cosimo he executed two wax groups, one now lost, the other the Vanity of Human Greatness (Florence, Mus. Zool. La Specola). For Ferdinand de’ Medici, the Grand Prince, who had acquired the Plague, he made the only other group that can safely be attributed to him, the Triumph of Time (Florence, Mus. Zool. La Specola; see fig.). These works combine rigorous scientific observation of the various stages of decomposition of the human body with an edifying iconography of the inevitable decay of human beauty and power. The idealizing classicism of the late Baroque figure style and the dramatic pathos of expression and pose, for which Zumbo drew on pictorial and sculptural models by Nicolas Poussin, Michelangelo and others, become in this context an expressive device emphasizing the lesson of ultimate decay. Accessory details, such as rats, snakes and dead dogs, are treated with grim realism. In the Triumph of Time a self-portrait in miniature rests against a pilaster at the feet of Time with his scythe. The groups are essentially illusionistic tableaux, and their backgrounds, symbolic inventions also figuring ruin and decay, combine painted and modelled features, perhaps developing an already established tradition.
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