This lunchtime it was very poignant to watch the last part of Paolozzi’s The Manuscript of Monte Cassino, specially made for the spot outside St Mary’s Cathedral, being craned aloft an HGV. It has now been put in place on a temporary basis in Hillside, but what will Picardy Place look like on its return?
Sir Tom Farmer was present at the photo call and he has his own forthright views on what might now happen. He told The Edinburgh Reporter that he had been fully consulted on the sculptures being moved. He said : “This is only a temporary move. These sculptures will come back here. I look forward to welcoming a new piazza outside St Mary’s Cathedral.
“I didn’t know Paolozzi terribly well, but he was in my sister’s class at school. You see it was Cardinal Gray who asked me to help out with these sculptures and I was pleased to do so.
“In twenty years time when trams are once again running down Leith Walk, it will be more like a boulevard with a lovely piazza at the top of it.”
Sir Tom gifted the Paolozzi sculptures to the city, having been asked by Cardinal Gordon Gray to do so. The cardinal is buried in the crypt at St Mary’s Cathedral where we gathered with other photographers to get a last look at the sculpture before it was moved.
The 1991 public sculpture was placed in the area of Edinburgh where Paolozzi was born and grew up. He attended the church as a young boy. The famous sculptor died in 2005, a proud Scot born to Italian parents, whose other works include Vulcan at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Wealth of Nations at the Royal Bank of Scotland at the Gyle and Newton after Blake at the British Library in London.
The various pieces of the Monte Cassino sculpture were designed so that people could walk among them, children could clamber on them and pools of water gather there. The poem from which the inscriptions are taken was written by an Italian monk from the abbey of Monte Cassino.
The council consultation on what the final design for Picardy Place will be is running until Friday 15 December 2017. Click here to have your say.
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