The artist who sculpted Charging Bull, the bronze statue in New York which became an iconic symbol of Wall Street, has died in his home town in Italy at age 80.
Arturo Di Modica died at his home in Vittoria on Friday evening, the town said in a statement on Saturday. Di Modica had been ill for some time, it said.
The sculptor lived in New York for more than 40 years. He arrived in 1973 and opened an art studio in the city's SoHo neighbourhood.
With the help of a truck and crane, Di Modica installed the bronze bull sculpture in New York's financial district without permission on the night of December 16, 1989.
The artist reportedly spent $US350,000 of his own money to create the 3.5-ton bronze beast that came to symbolise the resilience of the US economy after a 1987 stock market crash.
"It was a period of crisis," Rome daily La Repubblica quoted Di Modica as saying in an interview earlier this month.
He said he conceived of the bull sculpture as "a joke, a provocation" but instead "it became a cursedly serious thing".
Di Modica detailed how he and some 40 friends carried out a lightning-swift operation to plant the statue near Bowling Green park.
"Five minutes. The operations shouldn't have lasted more. Otherwise, we'd risk big," he recalled.
"After a couple of scouting trips, I had discovered that at night, the police made its rounds on Wall Street every 7-8 minutes."
When the sculptor and his friends arrived at the spot he'd picked, they were surprised to see a Christmas tree had been erected there.
They deposited the bronze bull anyway, and, as the artist told it, uncorked a bottle of Champagne.
Di Modica left Vittoria, Sicily, at age 19 for Florence, where he studied at the Fine Arts Academy.
At the time of his death, he was working on prototypes for a twin horse sculpture he planned to make for the Sicilian town.
The town declared Monday, when Di Modica's funeral will be held, as an official day of mourning.
Australian Associated Press
