Between art-history graduate students looking for dissertation topics and the marketplace looking for more things to sell, it is hard to believe there’s a modern artist we don’t know down to the last detail. But there is, and it is Medardo Rosso, the Italian sculptor who was born in 185 8 and died a few months short of his seventieth birthday, in 1928. Today Rosso is hardly known to us. His work is almost never exhibited in this country. And so little has been published about him outside his native country that the late Margaret Scolari Barr’s monograph, now twenty-five years old and long out of print, remains the standard text in English.

Yet the few who do know him, sculptors mostly, as well as art historians and critics, feel passionately about him. No wonder! His work is utterly bewitching. Unlike most sculpture, where palpably three-dimensional form is set out in real space, Rosso’s work is pictorial. His deeply human images of children sleeping, old men reading, and women laughing are intended to convey the illusion of form wrought from nothing more substantial than light and air. Often called “Impressionist sculpture,” his work seems to belong to the shadows as much as to the realm of tangible objects.

For Rosso’s admirers, 1988 was a banner year, there having been opportunities to re-acquaint oneself with his work on all of two occasions. The first came in the spring when an original wax, Rosso’s favorite medium, turned up in