(b Chieti, 31 Jan 1852; d Rome, 5 Dec 1925). Italian sculptor. He first trained for a business career but soon found his true vocation in sculpture. His earliest pieces were clay statuettes of shepherds for Christmas crèches, many of which were sold in his father’s dry-goods shop. In 1872, encouraged by his boyhood friend Francesco Paolo Michetti, he applied for and won a provincial scholarship to the Istituto di Belle Arti in Naples. He studied there with Stanislao Lista (1824–1908) but returned to Chieti in 1874 to support the family after his father’s death. The move from Naples did not disrupt his work, although it altered its direction away from the religious imagery favoured by Lista. Like Michetti and the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, Barbella found inspiration in the peasants of the Abruzzi countryside, and it was the terracotta group Song of Love (known as the Three Abruzzi Graces; Pescara, Pal. Gov.), exhibited at the Esposizione Nazionale in Naples in 1877, that established his reputation. Critics especially admired the animated modelling of the three young girls in Abruzzi peasant dress. The rest of his life was devoted to producing small terracotta and bronze sculptures, most no more than 500 mm high. The majority were anecdotal groups done in a style that joined an earthy verism with poetic sentiment. He used colourful patinas, whose formulae he carefully developed, on such bronzes as Drinking Boy (c. 1883; Naples, Capodimonte). His acute powers of observation created a demand for his sculpted portrait busts, including Pope Leo XIII (c. 1885) and an impressionistic Portrait of a Man (1898; Chieti, Pal. Cam. Commercio Indust. & Agric.). His output was enormous; only partial blindness and the death of his only son in World War I slowed his production. His sculptures inspired many imitations and innumerable reproductions and, although their diminutive scale placed them at a disadvantage in large gallery spaces, their descriptive narrative style held great appeal for the public in the late 19th century.