After the destruction of the House of Commons’ chamber in 1941, Winston Churchill famously argued for its reconstruction as it had been before, since a different form of building would mean a different form of politics: ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’.1 There are few museum buildings to which this aphorism can more justly be applied than the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, opened in 1991. 

Three new publications on Medardo Rosso seek conclusively to retrieve his reputation from the margins of the history of sculpture. Indicative of the steep rise of interest in Rosso among artists and art historians, they approach their subject from different perspectives. The first, a monograph, emphasises the internationalism and antimonumentality of Rosso’s work, aspects that were not conducive to the success of his sculpture in his day, but which made him so influential for modernist sculptors.