For decades now the bronze “Charging Bull” sculpture has become one of the most iconic symbols of Wall Street. And on February 19, the creator of the statue, Arturo Di Modica died at his home in Vittoria on the Italian island of Sicily due to cancer. He was 80.

Born on January 26, 1941 in Vittoria, Modica as a teenager was already drawn to sculptures and art became his calling. He was inspired by the ancient Greek and Roman artefacts of his childhood home.

However, in 1960, Modica left Sicily and his family for Florence drawn there by its reputation for artistic excellence and his own desire to be among many of Italy’s finest sculptors and painters.

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In Florence, he enrolled in a well-known academy Academia Del Nudo Libero and worked principally in bronze and other metals. But frequently he travelled to Carrara known for the world’s best marble where Modica created his own pieces in that marble at the renowned Studio Nicoli.

For the next 12 years, he established himself as an artist of great calibre in and around Florence. Then finally in 1973, Modica arrived in New York and opened an art studio in the city’s SoHo neighbourhood.

With the help of 40 friends, a truck and a crane, he installed the bronze bull sculpture in New York’s financial district without permission on the night of December 16, 1989.

The artist spent $350,000 of his money to create the 3.5-ton bronze beast that came to symbolize the resilience of the US economy after a 1987 stock market crash, the Washington Post reported.

“It was a period of crisis. The New York Stock Exchange lost in one night more than 20 percent, and so many people were plunged into the blackest of depressions,” Modica told Rome’s daily La Repubblica earlier this month.

He revealed the bull sculpture was conceived as “a joke, a provocation. Instead, it became a cursedly serious thing,” destined to be one of New York’s more visited monuments.

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Although the ‘Charging Bull’ became the most famous of his artworks, the ones he is most proud of are pieces in marble he exhibited at Rockefeller Center in 1977, works in bronze at Castle Clinton, Battery Park that same year, and his towering bronze horse Cavallo exhibited in Lincoln Center a few years later.

At the time of his death, he was working on prototypes for a twin horse sculpture he planned to make for his hometown in Sicily, as per Washington Post inputs.