Frank Vittor

Frank Vittor was born Francesco Fabio Vittori on January 6, 1888, in Mozzate, a town near Como in northern Italy, into a family of artists. The gift showed early — by his own account he was sculpting by the age of nine. He trained at an academy in Milan, then went to Paris and studied under Auguste Rodin, the most influential sculptor of the age. Rodin's mark stayed with him: a taste for rough, living surfaces over polished smoothness.

In 1906, at eighteen, Vittor got the break of a lifetime. The celebrated American architect Stanford White brought him to New York to work on his staff. Within two weeks of Vittor's arrival, White was shot dead at Madison Square Garden — the building White himself had designed — in a scandal that filled the front pages. Vittor had barely any money and very little English. He stayed in America anyway, teaching and taking studio work in New York.

Pittsburgh found him by accident. In 1917 he brought a show of more than eighty bronzes to the city, and local patrons — among them the famous astronomer and instrument-maker John Brashear — pressed him to stay. He settled there for good around 1920, married a Pittsburgh woman, Ade Mae Humphreys, and never left. He died in the city on January 24, 1968, at eighty.

Vittor liked his subjects big. He was drawn to the heroic and the colossal, and a steel city building bridges, parks, and war memorials gave him room to work at scale. He left more than fifty statues and fountains across the Pittsburgh region and, by his own count, over two hundred portrait busts in bronze.

He became known as the "Sculptor of Presidents" for his busts of Coolidge, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt — and later modeled the heads of all the presidents to that date for a museum display. His towering Christopher Columbus rose in Schenley Park in 1958. His Honus Wagner — the legendary shortstop — has watched over Pittsburgh baseball for generations, moving with the team from old Forbes Field to the modern ballpark. His most ambitious public work may be the four giant Art Deco granite reliefs on the George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge (1934), each panel a hymn to steel, electricity, and transportation. He founded the Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors and taught for years at the Carnegie Institute and Carnegie Institute of Technology (today's Carnegie Mellon University).

He could also take a note. Cemetery officials grumbled that his Thomas Jefferson statue looked "too Roman" in the face; the story goes that someone held up a Jefferson nickel for comparison, and Vittor reworked the nose to match. It is the same instinct that made his one coin work: read the subject, get the likeness right, keep the message plain.

His one piece of money is the Battle of Gettysburg half dollar. Congress authorized it on June 16, 1936, to mark the coming 75th anniversary of the battle and the planned Blue and Gray Reunion of 1938 — the last great gathering of the war's aging survivors. The job went to Vittor after the Pennsylvania commission chose his work from fourteen submissions.

For the obverse — the heads side — Vittor chose the simplest possible image of reconciliation: a Union soldier and a Confederate soldier, busts overlapping, both facing the same direction. He worked from real models, named in the records as J. P. Sankey and H. R. Lee. The federal Commission of Fine Arts, the body that vets U.S. coin designs, noticed that the two faces looked nearly identical — and let it stand. Whether Vittor intended it or not, the near-twin profiles read as the war's oldest tragedy: brother against brother. On the reverse, the shields of North and South sit side by side, parted by a fasces — a bundle of rods around an axe that has stood for civic strength since Rome — and framed by oak and laurel, the old emblems of war and peace. The Commission approved the models on March 24, 1937, and the coin was struck at the Philadelphia Mint that June, dated 1936 — the year Congress had authorized it, not the year it was actually made.

It did not sell out. Of 50,028 struck, 23,100 went unsold and were melted back into bullion, leaving roughly 26,900 in collectors' hands at the original price of $1.65 — a small surviving population that helps explain why the coin still draws attention a century on.