Most visitors barely notice the bronze relief of St Thérèse of Lisieux in the south transept of Westminster Cathedral, and few who stop in front of it would know the name of the artist. The cloaked young woman looking quietly over her shoulder is the work of Giacomo Manzù (1908-1991), an Italian sculptor who in 1950 won a competition to design a new door for St Peter’s.Modern art history has tended to marginalise Italian artists, who do not fit as neatly into “isms” as the French. Giacomo Manzù – short for Manzoni – is a case in point. The son of a poor shoemaker and sacristan at the church of Sant’ Alessandro in Bergamo, he taught himself to sculpt while apprenticed to a woodcarver and a stucco worker, and in his twenties be