Sojo, Felipe (?–1869)

Felipe Sojo (d. 1869), Mexican sculptor. At the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, Sojo was a part of the first generation of students to leave behind the colonial technique of sculpture in wood and color, replacing it with white marble. In 1853 students under the Catalán master Manuel Vilar presented a biennial exhibition of their work. Sojo's contributions, a relief entitled La degollación de San Juan Bautista and the portrait Señorita Barreiro, are representative of two of the most common forms of sculpture at the time: the religious theme and the portrait. Sojo later took up another theme in sculpture: allegory. After the death of Manuel Vilar in 1860, Sojo was named director of sculpture at the academy.

The variety of patrons with whom Sojo became connected is notable. In 1853 he sculpted an industrial allegory for the Spanish architect Don Lorenzo de la Hidalga's private residence. As director at the academy during the reign of Maximilian, he undertook two projects commissioned by the emperor himself: a sarcophagus for the emperor Agustín de Iturbide, which was never completed, and whose plaster model was destroyed by the new republican regime after its triumph over the French, and a portrait in marble of Maximilian, which resides at the Mexican Museum of National History.

See alsoAcademia de San Carlos; Art: The Nineteenth Century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fausto Ramírez, La plástica del siglo de la independencia (1985).

Eloísa Uribe, ed., Y todo … por una nación: Historia social de la producción plástica de la Ciudad de México, 1781–1910, 2d ed. (1987).

                                          Esther Acevedo