Lorenzo Bartolini
(7 Jan 1777 - 20 Jan 1850) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Lorenzo Bartolini |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Savignano, nr Prato |
| Nationality: |
Italian |
| Birth: |
7 Jan 1777 |
| Death: |
20 Jan 1850 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
sculptor and draughtsman |
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Biography
| He was one of the most independent-minded sculptors in Italy in the generation after Antonio Canova. His early work is in the Neo-classical style predominant throughout Europe around the turn of the century. While in the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David he became interested in the art of the Quattrocento, an interest confirmed when he settled in Florence after 1815. His later works combine Neo-classical and neo-Renaissance elements with, particularly in his portraits, a strong taste for naturalism. In 1812 he held a series of classes at the Florentine Accademia di Belle Arti, astonishing his colleagues by instructing his model to take up a series of instantaneous and casual poses, instead of the customary carefully contrived stance taken from a famous work of art. In 1839 he was made a professor at the Accademia, and again overturned traditional academic notions, this time by presenting the pupils in the life class with a hunchbacked model. Training and early years in Italy and France, to 1814. Bartolini was the son of a blacksmith. The family moved to Florence when he was young, and he was employed as a craftsman in a number of different workshops. At around the age of 12 he studied briefly at the Accademia di Belle Arti, but soon entered the workshop of the brothers Pietro (b 1740) and Giovanni (b 1742) Pisani, ornamental sculptors from Carrara. While he was there, he learnt the rudiments of the Neo-classical style from the sculptor Giovanni (Johann) Insom (1775-1831). In 1795 Bartolini moved to Volterra and entered the service of Barthelemy Corneille, a French sculptor who worked in alabaster. In this studio Bartolini came across John Flaxmans famous outline engravings illustrating Homers Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedies of Aeschylus, and these impressed him greatly. He made a number of tracings after them, and later he drew compositions, such as Jupiter and Thetis, inspired by their pared-down Neo-classicism.For a short period during the Napoleonic wars Bartolini was enlisted in the French army; he took part in actions along the River Trebbia in 1799. He then went to Paris, where he joined the studio of David. There he struck up a close friendship with Ingres, with whom he shared the same interest in the study of Italian 15th-century art. These studies reflected the debate being carried on at that time in Davids studio by the so-called Primitifs, who championed a style of art inspired both by the ancient Greeks and the Italian Primitives.In 1802 Bartolini won the Prix de Rome with Cleobis and Biton. This marked the beginning of his success with the Napoleonic government from whom he received a number of commissions. Among them were a colossal bronze bust of Napoleon for the pediment of the Pavillon Sully at the Louvre, Paris, and a bronze bas-relief of the Battle of Austerlitz for the Vendome Column in the Place Vendome, Paris. Evidence of the friendship of Bartolini and Ingres can be seen in the portraits they made of each other at this period. Ingres portrayed Bartolini in a drawing of 1805 and in an oil painting of 1806, which depicts the sculptor holding his relief of Cleobis and Biton, and Bartolini in turn portrayed Ingres in a bronze medallion. In 1807 Napoleons favour earned Bartolini the appointment of professor at the school of sculpture in the Accademia di Carrara, which Elisa Bonaparte, Regent of the Kingdom of Etruria, had reorganized as a state manufactory set up mainly for the serial production of sculptured portraits of members of the Bonaparte family and the imperial court. Here Bartolini produced many portraits, often in multiple versions, among them busts of Napoleon, Elisa Bonaparte, Lucien Bonaparte and Jerome Bonaparte. In 1810 Bartolini received an important commission for a colossal, semi-nude marble statue of Napoleon for Livorno. Completed in 1814 as the French Empire crumbled, it was rejected and remained in Bartolinis studio. It was finally erected in 1854 at Bastia, Corsica. The following year he completed his classicizing full-length marble group of Elisa Bonaparte Embracing her Daughter, Princess Elisa Napoleona. Exile and first years in Florence, 1814-27. In 1814, as the faithful Bonapartist that he had always professed to be, Bartolini followed Napoleon into his brief exile on the island of Elba. He subsequently moved permanently to Florence, but his reputation as a Bonapartist meant that for a long time he was excluded from public and grand ducal commissions. He earned his living mainly through portraits. He also, however, executed a few ideal works, commissioned from foreigners passing through Florence, and in this way he built up an extensive international reputation and acquired considerable social status. Among his early Florentine portrait busts are those of the poet Francesco Benedetti, of Frederick William Hervey, 1st Marquess of Bristol, of Sofia Apraxina, Princess Scerbatova, of Klemens Wendel Lothar, Prince Metternich, of George Gordon, Lord Byron and his mistress Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, of Maria Luisa of Bourbon and Charles of Bourbon. The male busts are conceived allantica, raised on socles, and have either broad shoulders and classical drapery or, more commonly, pared-down torso and no drapery. The female busts are less severe in appearance, with classicizing but definitely modern drapery and with contemporary hairstyles and jewelery. That of Sofia Apraxina has the torso cut at the waist and arms crossed against the chest.(ii) Portrait statues and groups. Bartolini also made a number of marble classicism portrait statues and groups at this time, including those of the poet Mrs Mary Tighe, of the sisters Lady Emma and Lady Julia Campbell and of Anne Lullin, wife of the Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard. By 1820 Ingres had arrived in Florence, where he stayed for four years. He and Bartolini resumed their friendship and exchange of artistic ideas, and Ingres painted a portrait of Bartolini. A number of parallel commissions attest to their closeness. For example, Ingres painted the portrait of the Russian ambassador to The Hague, Count Nicholas Dimitrievitch Guriev, when he passed through Florence in 1821, while Bartolini executed a splendid marble seated statue of his wife Maria, Countess Gurieva (both St Petersburg, Hermitage). Bartolinis full-length portrait of Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, Marchioness of Londonderry, with her Son, George Stewart (Wynard Park, Teesside) was painted in 1823. Monumental and ideal works. Other works of this period for foreign clients include the marble funerary monument of Henrietta Stratford Canning, a work in the form of a cinerary urn raised on a drum finely carved with allegorical figures in low relief, and the famous Grape Presser, a representation of a small, naked boy, one hand on his hip, treading grapes in a tub. The work exemplifies the artists interest in the art of 15th-century Italy. The first version was bought by James-Alexandre de Pourtales-Gorgier. In 1818 Bartolini received his first grand ducal commission, from Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, for a marble group of Charity Educating Children (Florence, Pitti), for the villa of Poggio Imperiale, Florence. The work has a neo-Raphaelesque quality that demonstrates how the artists style was also influenced by the masters of the 16th century. The plaster version was finished in 1824, and achieved such fame before the marble version was completed c. 1835 that it was decided to place the finished work in a more publicly accessible location in the Galleria Palatina of the Pitti Palace, where it was installed in 1836. In 1820 Bartolini received a commission for a great monument to Elisa Bonaparte, but flaws in the marble provoked a lengthy dispute with her husband, Felice Baciocchi, who had ordered the work. The completed sections stayed in Bartolinis studio and the main allegorical group, consisting of a seated female figure with the features of Elisa, representing Magnanimity, shown embracing Destiny in the form of a small boy, was eventually sold to Marchese Massimiliano Malvezzi Angelelli, who used it on his family mausoleum in the cemetery of the Certosa di Bologna. During this period Bartolinis style evolved increasingly towards a neo-Renaissance manner, and Titians famous reclining Venus (Florence, Uffizi) provided the inspiration for his marble Reclining Venus, executed around 1822 for Charles Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (1778-1854). Bartolini continued to work mainly for foreign clients; Reclining Bacchante, for example, was carved for William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. Around 1823 he began work on another large reclining female nude, a Juno for Prince Camillo Borghese (1775-1832), the marble version of which was never completed. With these works Bartolini had achieved full stylistic maturity, as well as a solid international reputation, the echoes of which soon led to important commissions in his home country as well. Thus in 1823 he received a commission for a large marble monument to Maria Luisa Bourbon. This consists of a colossal allegorical group in solemn Neo-classical style, the figures of which have the idealized features of Maria Luisa and her son Carlo Ludovico. The Demidov monument and works with moral themes. Bartolinis most prestigious commission from the late 1820s came from a foreign private client, the wealthy collector and patron Prince Anatole Demidov: in 1828 he commissioned a large marble monument in memory of his father Count Nikolai Nikitich Demidov, to be erected in the S Niccolo quarter of Florence, where the Demidovs lived. Work was slow, partly as a result of the difficult relations between sculptor and client, but by 1830 the general composition had been determined. It was to consist of a group in Classical dress representing Demidov seated, embracing his son Anatole and accompanied by an allegory of Gratitude. This group was to be raised on a three-tier podium decorated with female allegorical statues of Siberia, Truth Revealing herself to Art, Charity and the Muse of Hospitality. In 1837 Bartolini created a small marble model of it, and this was later replicated on a larger scale; however, the still incomplete statuary was in the artists studio at his death, and the monument was not erected until 1871. The 1830s were a time of intense activity for Bartolini. His most famous sculpture, Trust in God, a crouching, adolescent female nude, was commissioned in 1834 by the Milanese Marchesa Rosa Trivulzio Poldi Pezzoli in memory of her husband. The plaster model was completed by the end of the year and the marble was finished in 1836, when it was received with great acclaim by public and critics, who saw the work as an embodiment of that aspiration to stylistic purity, matched by an expression of high moral content, which together were essential components of 19th-century bourgeois taste. Bartolini tackled moral subjects in other works of the 1830s and 1840s, often through the medium of the female nude. Examples are the Nymph with a Scorpion, and the Nymph of the Desert. Another work with a moral theme is the so-called Table of the Cupids, a complex marble allegorical group of three recumbent children made for Anatole Demidov and completed in 1845. Bartolini undertook further important commissions for funerary monuments, often for people linked in some way to Napoleon or his family. In 1838, probably through Demidov, he obtained the commission for the marble funerary monument to Hortense Beauharnais, widow of Louis Bonaparte, ex-King of Holland. The monument, which consists of a kneeling effigy of the ex-Queen, was erected in St Pierre-St Paul at Rueil in 1845, where it attracted considerable criticism: in 1854 it was moved to the Napoleon museum at Arenenberg, being replaced with a less modest monument by Jean-Auguste Barre. In 1840 Bartolini made the funerary monument of Carlotta Bonaparte (Florence, Santa Croce), wife of Joseph Bonaparte, ex-King of Spain. It takes the form of a severely classicizing rectangular sarcophagus topped with a bust of the deceased. In 1841 he completed the marble monument to Count Mastiani Brunacci (Pisa, Campo Santo), a seated, mourning, female allegorical figure raised on a plinth decorated with the Brunacci arms and neo-Renaissance foliage. In the same year he also finished the marble monument to Count Adam Neipperg for the ducal chapel of S Ludovico, Parma (moved to the church of the Steccata, 1905), commissioned by his widow, ex-Empress Marie-Louise of France. The final years of Bartolinis career saw a vast output of marble monuments, destined for the church of Santa Croce, with its fine Renaissance tombs, which had become a sort of Florentine Pantheon. From 1837 until 1844 he worked on the tomb of the Polish Countess Sophia Zamoyska. This combines a neo-Renaissance format and details (including a Quattrocento-style circular relief of the Virgin and Child ) with a naturalistic statue of the countess on her deathbed. This naturalism, manifested in such details as the casually rumpled bed covers, was judged unseemly by many contemporaries, though the result is now considered to be one of Bartolinis finest and most moving funerary sculptures. The relief of a genius weeping over the funerary urn of the architect Louis Cambray-Digny was executed in 1844, while the allegorical monument to Leon Battista Alberti, commissioned by descendants of the artist in 1838, was not completed until the eve of Bartolinis death. The neo-Renaissance monuments to Vittorio Fossombroni and to Girolamo Segato, on which he started work in 1844, were unfinished at his death and were completed many years later in versions based only very loosely on his original ideas. In 1846 Bartolini completed one of the very few official commissions he obtained in Florence: his marble statue of Niccolo Machiavelli for the loggia of the Uffizi, which was given a mixed reception. His last years were also devoted to work on a colossal marble group of Astyanax Hurled from the Trojan Rock, which had been commissioned by the Marchesa Rosa Trivulzio Poldi Pezzoli in 1841. The force of this classicizing but highly energized work is amply represented in a superb pen and wash study. The plaster version was completed in 1843, but the marble was still unfinished on the artists death. The group, completed in 1857, probably by Lorenzo Vela (1812-97), is now known from a bronze cast made from the original plaster after the virtual destruction of the marble due to weathering in 1898. When Bartolini died he was already recognized as being one of the undisputed leaders of contemporary European sculpture. A full appreciation of his work is greatly assisted by the large collection of plaster models from his studio in the gallery of the Accademia di Belle Arti e Liceo Artistico, Florence, which comprises around 300 models for portrait busts and almost all the models for his most important funerary and ideal sculptures. Collections of Bartolinis drawings are to be found at the Museo Comunale, Prato, and the Uffizi, Florence. |
Samples of Work
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