Relief from Drabness

Weaving art and architecture together in the fabric of the city is the dream of many planners. Yet Manhattan's 30-year-old Rockefeller Center has long provided the prototype for such urban tapestries. Over the years, 30 artists* have installed more than 100 commissioned works in the complex city within a city. Some of its sculptures are even now legendary, if vintage: Paul Manship's gilded Prometheus, Lee Lawrie's 45-ft.-high Atlas looming over Fifth Avenue. There is even a 1932 Stuart Davis mural in a men's room. Appropriately, it is titled Men Without Women.

The newest acquisitions, lifted into place last week, are two reliefs by Italian Sculptor Giacomo Manzu, 56, who did the Doors of Death for St. Peter's in Rome (TIME, July 24). Designed for the portal of the Palazzo d'ltalia, the bronze plaques replace a blatant bit of Mussolini modern--a 1935 glass panel of a lump-shouldered shoveler by one Attilio Piccirilli, inscribed ART IS LABOR; LABOR IS ART. "Brutto!" exclaimed Manzu when he saw it and, commissioned by the Fiat automobile company, engraved in 1963 his own images in bronze.

At first, Manzu contemplated such portentous subjects as Venus, Minerva and Apollo, even thought of doing the death of Caesar. But happily he closed his ears to classical echoes and eyed the recent past. Manzu replaced the center of three glass doors side by side in the portal ("It is not the entrance to the subway") with a 3-ft. by 6 1/2-ft. panel depicting Italian emigrants to America. "Ours is a poor country," says he of Italy. "Our people went to America because they wanted to eat." With her worldly goods wrapped in a kerchief, a barefoot mother rests with her squalling baby as if on a pilgrimage. Another panel above the doors bears the letters ITALIA and a wishbone-shaped motif of intertwined wheat stalks and vines. Like the bunches of onions hanging in Manzu's kitchen near Rome, it is a fruitful symbol of the emigrant's search, as the sculptor says, for "the two principal things--drinking and eating."

* With Museum President Harry F. Guggenheim (right) before Pissarro's L'Hermitage.

* Among the best known: Isamu Noguchi, Josef Albers, Fritz Glarner, Gaston Lachaise, Louis Bouche, Naum Gabo, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and William Zorach. Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint the main fresco for the RCA Building's lobby, had his mural removed in 1933 when he inserted the face of Lenin.

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