Pompeo Coppini

Pompeo Luigi Coppini stepped off the boat in New York on 5 March 1896 with forty dollars, a trunk of clothes, and not a word of English. His first paying job in America was modeling figures for a wax museum. It was a long way down from where he'd trained — and a long way from where he'd end up.

He was born on 19 May 1870 in Moglia, a small town near Mantua in northern Italy, and grew up in Florence. There he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti under the sculptor Augusto Rivalta, graduating with highest honors in 1889. That schooling — the human figure built with anatomical precision and heroic feeling — was the whole of him. He spent the rest of his life defending it, and never made peace with modern abstraction.

Even his marriage came out of his art. A young woman named Elizabeth di Barbieri traveled from Connecticut, with a chaperone, to pose as the figure of Columbia for a memorial Coppini was building to Francis Scott Key. He fell for his model and married her in February 1898. But New York never gave him the fame he was sure he deserved. So in November 1901, hearing that a sculptor named Frank Teich was hunting for skilled help in Texas, he went south — and found his subject. He became a US citizen in 1902, settled in San Antonio, and over the next half-century filled the state with monuments. Texas claimed him as its own.

Coppini was a monument man to his bones. His instinct ran always toward the grand public statement — the soldier, the founder, the hero cast larger than life, with emotion written into every muscle. He left Texas covered in his work: the Confederate monument on the Capitol grounds in Austin, the equestrian memorial to Terry's Texas Rangers, the Littlefield Fountain at the University of Texas that took him eight years (1920–1928). His acknowledged masterpiece is the Alamo Cenotaph in San Antonio — The Spirit of Sacrifice — a sixty-foot marble shaft carrying the carved defenders of the Alamo, built between 1937 and 1939.

A coin asked the same instinct to shrink to fifty cents of silver, and Coppini could not bear to leave anything out. He designed the Texas Centennial half dollar in 1934 for no fee — and packed it. He gave the obverse (the heads side) a bald eagle perched against the Lone Star. The reverse (the tails side) was a riot: the winged goddess Victory in a liberty cap, holding the Alamo itself, with the portrait heads of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin floating in clouds and the six flags of Texas flying behind, all under the words "Remember the Alamo."

It was too much. The US Commission of Fine Arts — the federal body that reviews coin and monument designs — was blunt. Its chairman, Charles Moore, called Coppini's first models "a perfect hodgepodge" and complained that the portrait heads "are so small that they will disappear on a 50-cent piece." The commission's sculptor member, Lee Lawrie, sat down with Coppini in June 1934 and pushed him to simplify. A revised design won approval on 25 June 1934. The whole episode is pure Coppini: a heroic sculptor's eye trying to cram an entire nation's history onto a coin, and a committee gently prying his hands off it.