The Lost Coppini Statue Project was created in 2016. The Project seeks to re-create the 10-foot tall statue sculpted by Italian sculptor Pompeo Coppini in 1904. This heroic work, entitled “Victims of the Galveston Flood” was created to honor the over 8000 people who died in the catastrophic hurricane that ravaged Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900. The Victims statue was lost over 100 years ago and has had a troubled history since its creation in Coppini’s San Antonio studio.

The original design presented to Galveston was made of plaster and was rejected by Galveston leaders shortly after the Storm that same year, as being “too painful”. Hence, Coppini was not commissioned to create the statue in bronze. In 1904 the statue was sent to St. Louis World’s Fair to be exhibited in the Fine Arts Pavilion. The statue was lost for two weeks. Inadvertently labeled fruit, it was found in a cold storage warehouse on the fair grounds. Unfortunately, the statue could not be officially entered in to the arts competition at the Fine Arts Pavilion. It ended up being summarily relegated to a parlor in the Texas Building.

The Victims sculpture was later donated to the University of Texas in Austin in 1914. It is tragic that this sculpture, along with 23 other works donated by Coppini to UT, all vanished from the UT campus in the early 1920’s. There is no record of the loss. A UT search in 2016 did not recover any of Coppini’s work. Only three photographs of the finished heroic statue survived.

Coppini’s Victims heroic statue is one of the most powerful and moving works of his career. The Lost Coppini Statue Project hopes to see the magnificent Victims statue cast in bronze, full scale, as Coppini originally intended and thence installed in Galveston.

The story of the mysterious loss of Coppini’s Victims heroic from the University of Texas Austin campus was originally brought to John Bernardoni on April 27, 2016 by the nephew of the woman that posed for the statue along with his two nieces who also posed. During a luncheon having nothing to do with this subject, James Powell asked John, “Do you know anything about Pompeo Coppini’s statue, “The Victims of the Galveston Flood” which disappeared from the University of Texas campus?” John was greatly moved by this story, as his Italian family were part of the Galveston community for over 80 years. John also lost his great grandfather in the Storm of 1900.

After seeing photographs of this significant sculpture, John was so impressed and inspired he immediately began major efforts to locate the original Victims statue. He was determined to unravel this mystery. This search included the canvassing of 70 organizations, over 4000 emails and phone calls, an intense research effort with Ralph Elder, a 25 year veteran archivist with the Briscoe Center lasting months and an exhaustive UT building search at the Austin campus. Sadly, the Victims statue was not found. A second effort was launched immediately to identify a possible benefactor to finance the re-creation of the statue.

The re-creation of a full size, 10-foot bronze matching the existing photograph of Coppini’s statue is the ultimate goal of the project.