Sculptor of NYC’s famed ‘Charging Bull’ statue dies

— The sculptor of New York City’s famed Charging Bull statue — a big Financial District tourist draw and symbol of Wall Street power — died Friday at age 80, Italian media reported.

Arturo Di Modica died in Vittoria, his hometown in Sicily, said the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Di Modica had been fighting cancer for many years, and his condition recently worsened, the newspaper said.

“Charging Bull” debuted in December 1989 near the New York Stock Exchange at Broad and Wall streets, two months after the Oct. 13, 1989, stock market mini-crash.

Di Modica and co-workers placed the 3½-ton statue near the stock exchange in the dead of night in hope of eluding security patrols.

Traders didn’t like seeing the bull at its door. “I’m real upset,” the Daily News quoted Di Modica saying. “There are some really jealous and ignorant people in the stock market.”

The statue was soon moved to its current location on a traffic triangle on lower Broadway near Bowling Green, where it became a hit with out-of-towners and locals alike.

The statue is also widely used in the news media as a symbol of Wall Street.

“Charging Bull at Bowling Green is synonymous with New York City, the financial markets, optimism for the future, power and resiliency,” said Arthur Piccolo of the Bowling Green Association.

“No work of sculpture in history has been more photographed or appeared more in global media.”

For much of his life, Di Modica divided his time between New York and Sicily — according to the Charging Bull web site, he had studios on Grand Street and later on Crosby Street in lower Manhattan.

COVID-19 and poor health kept him in Sicily for at least the past year, La Repubblica said.

In recent years, Di Modica was working on a pair of 120-foot tall bronze horses — “The Horses of the Ippari” — which he hoped would be placed on the Ippari river in Vittoria. He recently completed a 24-foot high prototype of the sculpture.

His friends in Sicily hope to press ahead with the project. A local official told La Repubblica that Di Modica was “a visionary of beauty — he wanted to give Vittoria the greatness she deserves.”