Gaetano Giuseppe Faostino Meo (1849, Basilicata, Italy – 16 January 1925, London, United Kingdom) was an Italian-British artist's model, landscape painter, and a noted craftsman in mosaic and stained glass. His unpublished autobiography is a useful source for art historians of the Aesthetic Movement and Edwardian Era.
Model
He was a son of Rocco Meo, an Italian shepherd of Greek descent whose surname was probably a diminutive version of Bartolomeo, and Maria Francesca Meo (nee Pignone). He had at least three elder brothers and a younger sister, and grew up in the town of Laurenzana, in Basilicata, southern Italy. In 1864, Meo (age 15) and an older brother walked from Naples to Paris. Playing harp and lute, they supported themselves as street musicians while saving money for passage to the United States. By 1866, Meo was posing as an artist's model in Paris. The pair lacked passports, and were smuggled into the United Kingdom aboard a freighter from Boulogne. Meo remained in London, but his brother continued on to America.
Alone in London, Meo sought to play his harp in Italian restaurants, a safer place than busking in the streets, where he was more likely to be arrested by police, and deported. Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon claimed to have discovered the 18-year-old playing harp in the streets. "Meo represented a form of classical southern beauty much sought after in paintings of scenes from Greek mythology." In 1867, in Rome, Solomon painted a three-quarter-length watercolor of another model dressed as Bacchus. That same year, in London, he painted a head-and-bust oil portrait of Meo as Bacchus.
Meo posed for other British painters such as Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Luke Fildes, Henry Holiday, Henry Holland (1839–1927), Frederic Leighton, Edwin Long, George Heming Mason, William Blake Richmond, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. By 1870, he was also working as Rossetti's studio assistant.
Male models in England generally insisted on wearing loincloths, but Meo would pose fully nude. In his autobiography, Meo contrasted how models were treated in France versus England: In Paris the artists treated their models as friends, they were regarded as fellow workers in a great undertaking, coadjutors to whose dramatic and artistic co-operation the artists were greatly indebted. After work, the artist and his model dined together and talked, and the model, if intelligent, learnt much of Art. … But English artists were different, as a rule they treated their models as dirt! Not so Richmond and Rossetti, and Burne Jones – God bless him! – they treated their models as human beings.
Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones used his mistress, Maria Zambaco, and Meo as the models for Phyllis and Demophoön (1870). In the legend from Ovid's Heroides, Phyllis was the daughter of the King of Thrace, and Demophoön the son of King Theseus of Athens. On the day after their wedding, Demophoön departed for his father's land, promising to return for his bride. Phyllis would go to the shore each day to watch for his ship, but it never came. Finally, in despair, she hanged herself and the gods transformed her into an almond tree. When Demophoön finally did return, he remorsefully embraced the almond tree and it burst into bloom. The gods took pity on Phyllis, and transformed her back into a woman. Burne-Jones's innovation was to portray the moment of transformation, when the branches entangling Demophoön suddenly become the arms of Phyllis embracing him. "When the painting was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society for the 1870 Summer Exhibition, great controversy followed, partially because of Burne-Jones' affair, but also as a result of Demophoön's nudity. Due to the numerous complaints, Burne-Jones withdrew the painting from the exhibition two weeks after the opening." Burne-Jones later painted another version in oil, The Tree of Forgiveness (1881-1882), with Phyllis emerging fully nude from the trunk of the tree, and Demophoön's genitals covered by drapery.