Vincent Palumbo, 64; Cathedral Stonecutter

Vincent Palumbo, the last of the stonecutters to work on the carvings, gargoyles, saints and angels that adorn Washington National Cathedral, has died.

Palumbo died Dec. 21 at Washington Hospital Center of a rare form of leukemia. He was 64.

He was the fifth generation of stone carvers in his family, and for his first five years at the cathedral, Palumbo worked with his father, Paolo Palumbo, a cathedral stone carver until his death in 1966.

Over the last 39 years, Vincent Palumbo carved thousands of ornaments and statues at Washington’s Gothic-style cathedral, which dominates the western skyline of the national capital and is known officially as the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul.

The first of those carvings was a bird, chiseled atop an arch in the south transept. Later, Palumbo carved flowers and other animals. In 1985, he did a carving of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 17 years after the civil rights leader’s death. King had preached his last Sunday sermon at the cathedral, four days before his assassination in Memphis. For two years, Palumbo worked on the cathedral’s last major carving, Frederick Hart’s image of “The Creation,” which graces the west facade’s center portal. “I ended up where God began,” Palumbo said.

Officially, the cathedral, the sixth-largest in the world, was finished Sept. 29, 1990, 83 years after construction began. But “even though it’s finished, it’s not yet complete,” said Palumbo, estimating that another century of carving and cutting remained.

Palumbo was born in Molfetta, Italy. At 9, he began to frequent the family stonecutting shop where his father and grandfather practiced their craft. “So that I wouldn’t bother him, my father would give me a hammer and chisel to make me think I was doing something important,” Palumbo recalled decades later. “I would watch them and play around with the stone. This would go on for weeks, months and years, until one day I find out it’s not for play anymore.”

When he was still a child, his father immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Washington after a period of stonecutting work in New York.

In 1961, Vincent Palumbo arrived in Washington, joining his father on the cathedral’s stonecutting staff after short assignments that included restoring a statue at Dupont Circle and carving inscriptions at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in northeast Washington. While working at the cathedral, he studied at the Corcoran School of Art.

In his early days at the cathedral, Palumbo was known for a roving eye, and from his high scaffolding perch he liked to whistle at the pretty girls from National Cathedral School passing below. One such incident was witnessed by the cathedral’s dean at the time, Francis B. Sayre Jr., who scolded Palumbo for his behavior.

This scene would later be immortalized in an outdoor carving along the cathedral’s north wall, which depicts Palumbo hanging from the building while whistling at a group of National Cathedral School girls. A figure of a clerical angel bearing a strong resemblance to Sayre looks on disapprovingly.

In his career at the cathedral, Palumbo completed eight outer-aisle niche statues and their corbels, 90 vaulting bosses, and hundreds of carvings, embellishments, gargoyles and grotesques. His most recent work was the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt in the cathedral’s narthex.

Major works at the cathedral were approved by a committee, then cast in plaster by sculptors and given over to the carvers. “The sculptor creates it, but we give it life,” Palumbo said last year. “We say the original design is like the creation; the plaster model is the death. When we carve it in stone, that is the resurrection.”

But minor carvings were often left to the individual stonecutter’s imagination. During his early years at the cathedral, Palumbo was directed by Roger Morigi, his predecessor as master stone carver, to carve a row of two-inch-high decorations of whatever he wanted at the west end of the nave beneath a balcony.

“So I carved flowers. I carved birds. I carved all these other things. I carved a pumpkin, and then I ran out of ideas,” he said.

Palumbo and Morigi were subjects of a 1999 book, “The Stone Carvers: Master Craftsmen of Washington National Cathedral,” by Marjorie Hunt, a Smithsonian Institution folklorist who quoted Palumbo as describing stone carving as “the oldest trade in the world,” noting that God sent Moses down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments carved into tablets of stone.

Hunt also was a director and producer of an Academy Award-winning 1985 documentary on the cathedral stone carvers. In tribute for this work, she was immortalized in stone atop the cathedral’s north tower as the only angel in a 320-member heavenly choir holding an Oscar instead of a musical instrument.

Palumbo’s survivors include his wife, Mary Lou; three children from his first marriage, Nicolleta Palumbo, Christina White, and Michelle Mahaffey; two stepchildren, Rodney Adkins of Baltimore and Kathleen Winkler; and five grandchildren.