Italian · Contemporary figurative sculpture
Jago (Jacopo Cardillo)
b. 1987, Frosinone, Italy
Jago is the professional name of Jacopo Cardillo, an Italian marble sculptor born in Frosinone in 1987. Known for Habemus Hominem, The Veiled Son and a modern Pietà, he works in a former church in Naples that is now the Jago Museum.
1 work in the collection
Works by Jago (Jacopo Cardillo)
Jacopo Cardillo, who signs his work simply Jago, is an Italian sculptor born in Frosinone, south of Rome, in 1987. He carves figurative marble in the old way, by hand and at life size, and has become one of the few contemporary sculptors in Italy with a mass public, built partly through social media videos of the carving process.
Life in brief
Jago attended an art high school and then the Accademia di Belle Arti in Frosinone, which he left in 2010. His breakthrough came with a portrait bust of Pope Benedict XVI begun in 2009. Shown at the Venice Biennale, it earned him a pontifical medal; after Benedict resigned in 2013, Jago carved away the papal vestments and left the old man's bare chest. The reworked bust, Habemus Hominem ("we have a man"), made his name.
Later projects include The First Baby, a small marble infant that went to the International Space Station in 2019 with the European Space Agency's Beyond mission; Look Down, a curled marble baby placed in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples in 2020; and Figlio Velato (The Veiled Son), a dead child under a marble shroud, made in dialogue with Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ and shown in Naples's Rione Sanità. In 2022 the Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome gave him his first large solo exhibition.
Style and technique
Jago's subject is the human body under pressure: aged, grieving, newborn or dead. He works in white statuary marble and leaves the surface polished on skin and rougher elsewhere, so the stone still shows the tool. His references are openly historical, from Michelangelo to the Neapolitan veiled figures of the eighteenth century, but he empties them of saints and haloes, so that a religious formula becomes a scene any viewer can recognize.
The Pietà
His Pietà took about sixteen months in his Naples studio in the deconsecrated church of Sant'Aspreno ai Crociferi, through the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Instead of the Virgin holding Christ, as in Michelangelo's Pietà, a nude, heavy-set father kneels and lifts the limp body of his grown son, his face twisted by grief. It was first shown from October 2021 to February 2022 in the Chapel of the Crucifix of Santa Maria in Montesanto, the "Church of the Artists" on Rome's Piazza del Popolo.
Where to see his work
In May 2023 the Sant'Aspreno studio opened to the public as the Jago Museum, in the Rione Sanità district of Naples, where several major works can be seen. For the tradition he is answering, see Famous Sculptures.
Questions & answers
Who is Jacopo Cardillo?
Jacopo Cardillo is the Italian sculptor known as Jago, born in Frosinone in 1987. He carves life-size figurative marble and is best known for Habemus Hominem, a bust of Benedict XVI stripped of its vestments after the pope resigned, The Veiled Son and a Pietà showing a father holding his dead son.
Where is Jago's Pietà?
Jago's Pietà was carved in his Naples studio in the former church of Sant'Aspreno ai Crociferi and first shown in Rome at Santa Maria in Montesanto, from October 2021 to February 2022. It has since returned to Naples, where the studio opened as the Jago Museum in 2023.
What is the Jago Museum?
The Jago Museum is the sculptor's studio in the deconsecrated church of Sant'Aspreno ai Crociferi in the Rione Sanità, Naples, opened to the public in May 2023. Visitors can see finished sculptures alongside work in progress in a Baroque church interior.