Episode 54 - Lorenzo Bartolini

From Florence, Italy, the city of inspiration for sculptors in ages past and for centuries to come, you're listening to The Sculptor's Funeral. Good day to you all, and welcome once again to another episode of The Sculptor's Funeral, the podcast for figurative sculptors everywhere. I'm your host, Jason Arkles, a sculptor and instructor, living and working in Florence, Italy, where all the great sculptors are dead, and I don't feel so well myself. And today, we are going to continue our discussion of neoclassicism, and see just how Italian neoclassicism evolved in the generation after Antonio Canova. In earlier episodes, we have explored what neoclassicism is, and we've talked about Canova, the greatest of the neoclassical sculptors. And if you are a long-time listener of the podcast, you might remember last year when I discussed the French sculptor Francois Roude, who was the first French sculptor to evolve from the idealized style of neoclassicism in search of a more humanistic, more naturalistic, and more individual way forward in sculpture. And that search of Francois Roude's was basically the beginnings of the movement known today as Romanticism, at least in sculpture. Now, the achievements of Francois Roude paved the way for much of what was to come in the rest of the 19th century, from the evolution of instruction at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the ateliers of Paris, to the explosion of diversity and personal style leading to the likes of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and eventually Auguste Rodin. But that was France. And France was unlike any other nation on earth in the 19th century. The Emperor Napoleon had made neoclassicism the official style of his empire, rendering the old Rococo styles favored by the deposed French royalty obsolete. But the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 also meant the beginning of the overthrow of neoclassicism as an official style, though it certainly was practiced and popular for several more decades. But it was only a matter of time before Romanticism rose in the wake of regime change in France. But we need to remember that neoclassicism wasn't just a French phenomenon. It was a European one, an aesthetic pioneered by the German historian Wankelmann, and an artistic style evolved in Rome by Canova, and later by Bertolt Torvaldsen, and many followers of both. The defeat of Napoleon was bad news for neoclassicism, but only in France. In Rome, in England, and eventually in the United States, the neoclassical ideal endured as the pinnacle of artistic endeavor for much longer than was politically possible in France. It's basically the reason the arts of France became the most progressive in the world. It was just impossible for the art of France to remain static in the face of its particular political upheavals. And when we look at 19th century sculpture today, that's how we see it. We see France is the progressive nation, and Italy, England, Russia, Germany, the United States, they all seem to be a little bit behind the times, if not exactly cultural backwaters. And I suppose that was true to some extent, but only in terms of broad artistic movements. There certainly was no lack of talent, even genius, to be found outside of France, and even within the scope of neoclassicism. We can find several very progressive figures around Europe who embraced Romanticism as a style, or who evolved neoclassicism into new modes of expression similar to the aims of Romanticism. But we don't really hear about these folks, because they didn't do it in France, or at the Académie Royale, or the École des Beaux-Arts, or the Paris Salon, which is what we tend to think of when we think of the 19th century. So today's podcast kicks off a series of episodes which will focus on the other 19th century, the one operating outside, as much as was possible, of the political and artistic revolutions of in places like London, Florence, Rome, and eventually in the upstart fledgling nation known as the United States of America. But our story of the other 19th century begins, as does every story of the 19th century, in France in the context of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. Now the subject of today's podcast is a man named Lorenzo Bartolini. Born in 1777, just a few years before the beginning of the French Revolution, Lorenzo grew up in an atmosphere infused with Republican ideals, a sentiment generally shared by Tuscans and influenced by many Parisian expatriates who found their way to Florence during some of the more tumultuous times of the Revolution. Lorenzo attended the Académie de Firenze, the centuries-old art academy here in Florence, before apprenticing himself to a French expatriate, a revolutionary, and a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, Bartémy Corneille. Now Lorenzo Bartolini had a deep sympathy with the Republican cause and with Napoleon, and when this combined with his interest in the new neoclassical style of sculpture he was learning at the workshop of his French master in Tuscany, the pull towards Paris became irresistible. When the French army passed through Tuscany on its march home to Paris from Naples, Bartolini enlisted and marched with them. But once in Paris, he managed to use his connections to enter the newly reformed National Art School, then called the Académie Nationale, and into the atelier of his master's master, Jacques-Louis David himself. I've talked a bit about David in several episodes, most notably in the episode about François Roud. David was a painter and the exemplar of the neoclassical style in France, having learned in Rome at the studio of Anton Mengs and having known Vankelman and Canova, and it was in David's studio where Bartolini became fluent in the styles and the intellectualism of neoclassicism. He was learning to read in Greek, studying the writings of both Vankelman and a man named Emmerich David, another influential writer who offered a sort of a counter-argument to Vankelman's approach to the ancients. Emmerich David's book, Thoughts on the Art of Sculpture, was a book that was to greatly influence not only Bartolini but François Roud's novel approach to sculpture just a few decades later, when Roud also studied under Jacques-Louis David. In the development of sculpture in the beginnings of the 19th century, it's difficult to underestimate the importance of Jacques-Louis David's influence on that generation's sculptors, most prominently François Roud and Lorenzo Bartolini. The thing about David was that although he was regarded as the premier neoclassicist painter of his day, he wasn't as staunchly conservative as one might expect. David was influenced most of all by the Greeks, but not only by the Greeks, and in his teaching atelier, the most prestigious atelier in Paris at the time, David's students were working from the living nude on a daily basis. Now this was a bit of a different approach than what students were offered at the Académie Royale, which was what the national art school in Paris, the Académie Nationale, was called before the French Revolution, and under that old regime, students worked from carefully composed canons and from a very limited set of poses, and the use of the live model was much more limited than we might expect today. In the new version of the French art school, the Académie Nationale, this was still largely the way students learned to paint and sculpt, but in David's atelier, where he could teach as he himself worked, he encouraged his students to copy nature without preconceptions, to choose naturalistic poses away from the conventional academic poses, and to develop a naturalistic conception of the human figure, not one based on a canon of proportion. Now David's method of working from life in a naturalistic manner and without preconceptions seems as though it would be at odds with the methods of a neoclassicist, someone who wanted to emulate the Greek ideals of the human figure. In fact, there was a faction of students in David's own atelier who were much more rigorously conservative in their classical tastes, to the point that David eventually kicked them out of his studio. But David's leanings towards naturalistic observation and rendering of the figure went only so far, of course. The idea was to start with nature and then idealize it, rather than starting with an idealized Greek prototype and adapting it for use in a painting or a sculpture, and then sort of filling in the gaps with the live model. Although David and his students were working primarily from life, there was a lot of selection and editing of what they found in the human figure, which led to a refined, elevated conception, as opposed to, you know, sort of a warts and all approach, which is common today in a life drawing studio, where what you see is what you produce in charcoal or paint or clay. So, we today remember David as the master of neoclassicism, but he should also be remembered as the master of the two sculptors who would chart the course for 19th century Romantic sculpture, a legacy which probably would have shocked David. Lorenzo Bartolini proved to have a huge appetite for his studies of history, poetry and rhetoric, archaeology and philosophy. In his spare time, his interests were in music, theater and opera. In addition, a sizable component of his education was, of course, his circle of friends and acquaintances and other sculptors with which he had contact, which included the English neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, and also Bartolini's very close friend and future guiding light of painting, Dominique Inge. Bartolini and Inge shared a studio with another painter for several years, and their aesthetics and interests developed in lockstep with one another. His eclectic influences and interests were just a background, of course, to his principal area of study, which was, of course, sculpture. His efforts were soon rewarded, and Bartolini took the silver medal in his third year of study, which brought him to the attention of several notables, instrumental in the French Revolution. But for any artist in Napoleonic France, the one person who could make your fortune was Napoleon himself. And in fact, Bartolini was commissioned to produce a colossal bust of Napoleon in bronze for the Louvre Museum, a bust which was very well received. So well received, in fact, that Napoleon bestowed upon Lorenzo Bartolini a singular honor. Bartolini was to become the official portrait sculptor of the Bonaparte family. However, there was a significant catch to this honor. Bartolini would have to leave Paris and take up a studio in Carrara, Italy. Now, to explain why, I need to give a little backstory here. You see, in the first decade of the 19th century, Napoleon's continuous military victories and supremacy meant that new territories fell under his imperial control pretty regularly. This meant a restructuring of political power that dissolved older kingdoms and nations, like the Republic of Venice, and created new ones. And in 1806, the territories of Massa and Carrara fell to Napoleon, who promptly put them under the control of his little sister Elisa and her husband. Elisa became the princess of Piombino and later the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. This, of course, all happened many decades after the Medici dynasty had died out in Florence. Anyway, Elisa was keen to take hold of the backwater economy of Carrara and its marble industry, which was unorganized and weak, and reorganize it into an economic and industrial powerhouse owned by the state. In effect, Carrara would become a state-owned manufacturing facility which served the needs of the empire. Now, to do this, a controlling body called the Banca Elisiana was set up, which was kind of this strange umbrella organization. It was part bank, part factory, part educational and social reform society, whose purpose was to affect this transition to the area's economy and, indeed, to the entire culture. And it was Lorenzo Bartolini, the Parisian-trained Italian sculptor and eager servant to the empire, who was appointed technical director of the Banca Elisiana, and given the roles of sculptor, producing commission to work for the imperial family, but he was also made supervisor of other workers, as well as a teacher of sculpture at the Accademia di Carrara, a small regional art school in Carrara, similar to the Accademia di Firenze in Florence. And this restructuring of the marble industry at the hands of the Banca Elisiana is really the birth of Carrara as we today know it. You see, before this restructuring and centralization of marble output, Carrara was known as the place where marble comes from, and not really a place where marble sculpture was made. Think of all the sculptors of Rome and Florence of the past, Michelangelo, Bernini, Canova. The practice up to that point was to import marble to where the sculptors were. Elisa Bonaparte's restructuring put many artists, like Bartolini, right where the marble was, a concentration of not just labor and raw materials, but also the training of skilled artisans and artists at the Accademia di Carrara. Now, this affected an industrial revolution in the area, and thus it remains today. If a sculptor has a large work to execute in marble, either they go do it in Carrara or the next town over, Pietrasanta, but more frequently a sculptor from anywhere in the world will contract the carving out to a carving studio in Carrara or Pietrasanta, and then the finished work is then shipped to the sculptor from that place where it was carved. And this all starts in 1806 with Elisa Bonaparte, and in part under the direction of Lorenzo Bartolini. I'm going to do a podcast on the history of Carrara and I'll talk about the Banca Elisiana and its influence in detail at a later date. But for now, what's good to know in terms of our discussion is that the Banca Elisiana produced countless reproductions of antique works, as well as innumerable portraits of the imperial family, both as private commissions and for sale to the public. There was an official decree that every public building in the empire must have a marble bust of Napoleon, so you can imagine just how many were reproduced at this time in Carrara just of portraits of Napoleon. However, like Napoleon's reign, the Banca Elisiana did not last very long. As much as the economy was transformed for the better in the area, there was still a ton of resentment towards the French empire, and when Napoleon was banished into exile in 1813, the Banca Elisiana, as well as Bartolini's own workshops, were sacked and destroyed by the locals. Although Bartolini's time in Carrara was short, from about 1808 to 1813, it was a significant time in his own formation as an artist. Bartolini was fresh out of school from Paris, and when the 21-year-old came to Carrara, he was confronted with a bit of antipathy coming from the older, more experienced marble workers and sculptors. These were Italian-trained artists and artisans who practiced a neoclassical style guided by Vankelman and exemplified by Canova. Theirs was a method of modeling figures which had little use for live models or natural beauty, and more reliant on the formulas of ideal beauty derived from study of the antique. This aesthetic generally was very different from what Bartolini had learned from David in Paris, but Bartolini had a strong ally and personal friend in the form of Elisa Bonaparte. And Bartolini was free to introduce the methods he had learned in Paris to a new, eager class of young students at the Accademia di Carrara, who warmly welcomed the newer, softer, more naturalistic style of neoclassicism that Bartolini offered. As Bartolini had done in Paris, the classes he taught utilized the living nude model as the basis of their study, and Bartolini was careful to search for poses which the models could assume naturally, rather than choose from the small number of meticulously constructed poses to which the more conservative neoclassicists limited themselves. There are a few sculptures from this period of activity, from Bartolini and from the Banca Elisiana, which show the subtle differences between Bartolini's more naturalistic approach and what was more generally offered as official neoclassical work. Now, as always, you can find images at the website thesculptorsfuneral.com. Just go to the image gallery for this episode, which is episode number 54, and there you will find a plaster cast of a seated figure of Elisa Bonaparte in the guise of the goddess Minerva. Now, this plaster was meant to be made into marble, but the Bonapartes fell before this was accomplished. So, looking at the plaster cast, we can see that the sculpture gives very few clues that this is really a portrait statue. Only a few details in the face, like the strong Bonaparte chin, indicate that this is a portrait statue at all. Now, standing next to the Grand Duchess is the figure of a young boy holding a scroll, presumably an allegorical figure representing the newly established Napoleonic Code. This young figure is relaxing into a very, very natural pose, obviously drawn as much from nature as from sources perhaps like the Hermes of Praxiteles. But in contrast, we can look at another statue, a statue of the daughter of Elisa, who is named Napoleone Elisa. It is a statue of a nude little girl, six or seven years old, holding a cup in one hand and the other hand is resting on the snout of her dog. And it's in this early work, done in 1812, that we find all the ingredients for Lorenzo Bartolini's work for the rest of his career. I hope everyone takes a look at this sculpture. It's really an interesting and quite a charming little statue. So, what are the ingredients for a Bartolini statue? Well, first off, we can easily see that it falls squarely into the realm of the ideals of neoclassicism, with Wengelman's insistence on calm simplicity and noble grandeur. The forms and volumes of this little girl are simplified and reduced to the essential volumes and profiles, and never get bogged down with detail or bravura modeling. The cup she's holding gives the figure a classical alter ego, that of Ebbe or Hibi, the goddess of youth and daughter of Zeus and Hera, the perfect match for the young daughter of the Grand Duchess and her husband. But moving past the prominence of the neoclassical mode in this work, we find a very sensitive portrait and a very skillfully rendered and naturalistic pose, both in the child and in the dog. The dog itself is beautifully observed and rendered. But most importantly, we see that the figure of the little girl, as simplified and as idealized as it may be, is really based on observation. There's no obvious relation of the proportions of this figure to any known antique work. And we actually, in fact, do know that the young Napoleone Elisa, the subject of the statue, actually posed nude for Bartolini at her mother's insistence. Now, we're not sure why the Grand Duchess chose to do this. Now, there's a theory that she wanted to rid her daughter of notions of false modesty. And there's another theory relating to the philosopher Rousseau. And Rousseau had a theory, something about the native innocence of children that this statue possibly exemplifies. Or it could be that after having posed herself for Lorenzo Bartolini, and not just for the seated Minerva statue, but also for a beautiful and naturalistic portrait bust, the Grand Duchess knew that it was when working from life that Bartolini did his best work. That seems to me to be the most plausible reason. In any event, the statue of Napoleone Elisa and her dog is a testament to the remarkable ability Bartolini had for creating an ideal while working directly from life, in the way that the Greeks themselves might have done. This puts Bartolini's methods in line with the writing of Enric David, the book on sculpture I mentioned earlier, which advocates exactly for what Bartolini was doing, idealizing right from nature, rather than copying forms of antique sculpture. And this is the fundamental difference between sculptors like Canova and Torvaldsson, and the following generation which Bartolini heralded. Canova worked in emulation of the Greeks, while it may be said that Bartolini worked in sympathy with the Greeks. And as I mentioned, the writing of Enric David was to highly influence another sculptor, François Rude, while in exile at Brussels in the company of Jacques-Louis David just a few years later. And Enric David's writings would influence Rude in much the same way as it did Bartolini. Anyway, until 1813 and the sack of the Banca Elisiana, the success of Lorenzo Bartolini had depended entirely on imperial patronage. And once Napoleon was sent into exile, and the Banca Elisiana and its sculpture factories were sacked, what was to become of Bartolini? We'll hear all about it when The Sculptor's Funeral continues. All right, it's time to give a shout to one of the sponsors of the podcast. That's right, friends, Blick Art Supplies, the largest and oldest provider of art supplies in the United States, who ship their quality wares around the world. Their superior customer service, extensive selection, and competitive prices make them the choice for professional and amateur artists, art educators, architects, designers, students, and hobbyists. Virtually anyone requiring quality art materials for work or pleasure. 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So the next time you stock up on armature wire or mold rubber, modeling tools, and plastelina, do it in a way that supports the only podcast out there devoted to the global community of figurative sculptors. Go to thesculptorsfuneral.com and click on Blick and support the show and thank you. Okay, after the fall of Napoleon, Tuscany was taken out of the hands of the Grand Duchess Elisa Bonaparte and given back to the Grand Dukes of Lorraine who had ruled before Napoleon. Bartolini decided to return to Florence where he had grown up and where he had begun his studies and where he now was elected into the Accademia di Firenze, the official state-run academy of art in Florence. Now he had gained a reputation among patrons of art as one of the finest sculptors in Italy. However, things were not easy for Lorenzo Bartolini at this time. The same resistance he had found towards his French training and aesthetic in Carrara he found also in Florence. This was exacerbated by his pro-Bonaparte sympathies, sympathies he never denied or took the trouble to hide. And so, as popular as he was with those who bought art, his peers at the academy were much less welcoming. The head of the academy, Pietro Benvenuti, a conservatively neoclassical painter, openly criticized and opposed Bartolini's election into the academy. There's a great little story which illustrates the differences in methods and aesthetics between Bartolini and the older neoclassicism practiced at the Accademia di Firenze. You see, it periodically fell to each professor of the Accademia to pose the nude model for the life classes. Typically this involved a professor meticulously posing a model in the exact pose of a known classical work, you know, of an Apollo or a Mars or a Minerva. And the first time it was Lorenzo Bartolini's turn to pose the model, he made a point of posing the model in front of all the students so that they could understand his methods. He had the model get up on the modeling stand, and when the model turned around to ask Bartolini how to pose, before he could finish his turn, Bartolini called out for the model to freeze in position mid-turn. The entire class, along with the custodian of the model room, all burst into laughter at what they all regarded as a ridiculous way to pose a model, and the students refused to attend the lesson. A few years later, Bartolini ended up resigning his position as professor at the Accademia di Firenze in 1817. Now the friction between Bartolini and academic officialdom in his early career stands in contrast with his private career. In his Florentine studio, Bartolini soon became famous for his portraiture, which was a product of his keen, observant eye and tendency towards naturalism, which are essential attributes for any portrait, but he took his portraits a little further than nature, relying on his ability to refine nature into an ideal mode, which was very much to the tastes of his clients. Bartolini's training in observation and naturalism at David's studio in Paris made him a fairly unique sculptor in Italy, more capable of capturing a likeness than any Canovian sculptor could. And although we today might look at these idealizing portraits as a sort of facile and repetitive way to do a portrait, they proved irresistible to the many foreigners passing through Florence who would sit for Bartolini for the clay modeling of a portrait bust and then receive, several months later, the finished marble bust delivered to their native residents. For the upper classes of Europe, having a bust done in Florence was an essential part of the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour refers to the centuries-old tradition of sending the youth of the upper classes to travel through France and Italy in order to provide a cultural perspective and engender good taste, and to generally see the world and have a good time. Today we call it a gap year or study abroad, but it's essentially the same thing. Bartolini's studio became one of the main attractions on the Florentine leg of the Grand Tour and provided Bartolini with a solid business for the rest of his life. However, Bartolini didn't just settle into a life of making portraits. Bartolini's taste and education were far too eclectic for that. In his earlier education, Bartolini and his friend the painter Ong had passionately studied the art of the Florentine Renaissance, and now that Bartolini was back in Florence, he fostered that interest once more. And it wasn't the idealization and classicizing of Michelangelo that Bartolini turned to, but to the work of the early Renaissance sculptors, notably Verrocchio. The sculpture from Bartolini which epitomizes this interest in the early Renaissance is the one called the grape presser, a figure of a youth trampling grapes underfoot in a large wooden bucket. The youthful proportions and pose of this figure recalls Verrocchio's David very strongly. Bartolini's best work always seems to be found in his representation of the young, just as it was with Verrocchio and also with Desiderio da Settignano and other mid-15th century Florentine sculptors. Verrocchio's bust called Lady with a Primrose also became the basis of several half-torso female portraits that Bartolini made over the years. But for my money, Bartolini's best work from his first decade back in Florence, after Carrara, has to be his allegory known as La Carità Educatrice, or Charity Educating Children, made for the Grand Duke of Lorraine, Ferdinand III. The work was begun in the early 1820s but not finished in marble for over a decade. But even before the marble was finished, the work became famous, as it had been seen by many who passed through Bartolini's studio. It's a three-figure group of a woman holding an infant in one arm while the other hand rests upon a youth holding a scroll. Her gesture towards that youth seems to indicate that she is instructing him in some way. Now, allegorical statues of charity go back all the way to the Gothic era in the history of Florentine sculpture, but Bartolini's is the most original and the most moving. Here, the quiet grandeur of the neoclassical ideal is transmuted into the calmness of a domestic scene by the use of contemporary dress and hairstyles and a natural pose. But rather than diminishing the nobility of the abstract theme of charity with these touches, the convincing poses and composition sort of work to elevate what might be a mere domestic scene into something noble. Many scholars also detect in this work Bartolini's strong interest and intense study of early Renaissance sculpture and painting, particularly Raphael. I don't know of a more perfect balance in sculpture between notions of the real and the ideal than this work. In this respect, it ranks right alongside Francois Roud's Neapolitan Fisherboy and actually, in my view, surpasses it. And photographs really don't do it justice. It's a work I first encountered face to face in an exhibition a few years back and I was just absolutely struck by it. You can find it now in the Pitti Palace here in Florence, though I'm not really crazy about the lighting the work gets in its current position. Anyway, a major component of the composition for this work, that of the youth leaning onto the adult figure of charity for support, is one that we've seen before in Bartolini's portrait statue of Elisa Bonaparte as Minerva, and it recurs again and again in Bartolini's work for the rest of his life. Using two or three figures to represent a single allegory gave Bartolini the ability to express a whole range of concepts tied to that allegorical motif. So, for instance, in the charity allegory, where the adult woman holding the baby, that's the allegory of charity, we've seen that before, but the youth reading from the scroll imparts the notion that education is also an act of charity. Doing this gives allegorical work something sort of more specific to grab onto, gives it a focal point and a sort of a concrete example of an abstract idea, or, as with Bartolini's charity, it actually expands the definition of the allegorical motif itself. As with many artists, Lorenzo Bartolini's style evolved as his career progressed. He never lost sight of the idealism that inspired the Greeks, and this fact kind of earned him the nickname the Phidias of Tuscany, but over time his allegorical work became less tied to mythological references and more attuned with the natural beauty to be found inherent in his live models. One work which absolutely stands out in this respect is a figure that many consider to be Bartolini's masterpiece. It's titled Faith in God, and it is nothing more than a single nude female kneeling with her hands in her lap and her gaze tilted skyward. No allegorical icons, no classical drapery, only her blank pupils and sort of classically proportioned facial features characterize this work as something produced in the neoclassical era. Every other part of this figure strikes the perfect balance between observation of the living nude and a subtle and refined idealism. The balance is so perfect it might be better to describe the figure not as an idealized nude but as a purified one. The pose is completely novel and completely natural, and somehow it's as sensual as it is moral. It really is Lorenzo Bartolini at his greatest. He achieves perfectly what neoclassicism strives for, the creation of an iconic image that leads the through the mere physicality of the work and into the contemplation of the nobility of the soul. And he does it more simply, more economically, and more naturally than Canova or Torvaldsen ever could. It's from Bartolini, and from those who thought as he did, that we get the notion that beauty arises from truth and truth from beauty. In Bartolini's mind, unadorned nature was a type of eternal truth, and as such was beautiful. Likewise, all that we find beautiful must contain an element of truth. Now, if you listened to the podcast on Canova, you heard me say that Canova too strikes a perfect balance. But Canova and Bartolini are walking on different tightropes. Canova's balance was between the Greek ideal and contemporary notions of beauty. Canova's best work is a balance between decorative rococo sweetness and the Greek ideal. That's Canova's tightrope. But Bartolini balances the Greek ideal not with stylized sweetness, but with visual naturalism, or as he saw it, truth. It seems as though the best neoclassical sculptors were neoclassical and. You know, they always had to add something. Both Canova and Bartolini found success in augmenting the Greek ideal with contemporary tastes of one fashion or another. Bartolini's huge popular success, both commercially and artistically, would produce two generations of emulators and imitators in Italy, keeping his hybridization of neoclassicism and naturalism alive in Italy for far longer than what was seen in the realm of art centered in Paris and In Paris, political and societal upheavals from the French Revolution, the Bourbon Restoration, and the events leading to the Second Empire would catapult the arts into a frenzied, fractured, almost apocalyptically-minded materiality and sensuality in which the neoclassical ideal just had no place. In the relatively calmer waters of Rome and Florence, similar upheavals were leading not towards a fracturing of society, but towards the unification of the Italian Peninsula into a new, single political entity known as the Republic of Italy. The idea of a new, unified, and autonomous Italy harkens strongly back to, well, to the last time that occurred under ancient Rome, and that obvious connection between contemporary and classical Italy proved very fertile ground in which neoclassicism might flourish and perhaps evolve into something new. The sculpture of Lorenzo Bartolini is just one aspect of his legacy and influence throughout Italy of the 19th century, and possibly his most impactful contribution to art came in the form of his teaching, both privately in his studio and later in life, when he once again became a professor of the Accademia di Firenze. As I mentioned previously, Bartolini had a rocky relationship with the director of the Accademia and had resigned after a short tenure in 1817. Now, as Bartolini's professional and artistic stature grew over the years, his name was put forward as a possible replacement as the maestro di scultura at the Accademia, once in 1825 and again in 1837, when maestro Stefano Ricci died. Now, this second attempt to gain the chair of the sculpture department was a success, and Bartolini remained in that position from 1837 until his death in 1850. However, Bartolini's tenure as a sculpture department head was fraught with controversy, just as it had been when he was a young professor decades before. Bartolini immediately worked towards making big changes to the curriculum to include much more time for students to work directly from life and to give sculptors dedicated classroom and studio space separate from painters. Bartolini's efforts on the behalf of his students, as well as his style of instruction, made him very popular with the student body, and his classes became swollen with eager pupils. Now, there are a few events which serve to illustrate just how progressive Bartolini really was. One is his very early adoption of the use of photography. In fact, it was so early it wasn't even photography. It was an earlier process known as a daguerreotype, named after its inventor, Daguerre. The first daguerreotype produced in Italy happened in 1839, and by early 1840, Bartolini was using the process to take images of his sitters, and a few of these daguerreotypes actually still survive. It's only natural that Bartolini would be the first sculptor to turn to photography if it's right in line with his search for unadorned truth. Naturally, a sculptor who idealized or classicized portraits would have little need for photographic reference, but for Bartolini, the daguerreotype provided the most accurate, permanent representation of reality known at the time. Now, the introduction of the daguerreotype in Bartolini's atelier also gave his assistants and his students a powerful new tool. When Bartolini died, one of his students was asked to finish a figure group for a monument that Bartolini had begun in clay. The fresh clay models were still in the studio, so the student took daguerreotypes of these clay models before he continued to work on them, images that he could then show to the commissioners of the monument to prove how faithfully his finished work was to Bartolini's original intentions. These daguerreotypes are the earliest documents of clay models in progress that we have. They're the earliest progress shots of any sculptor's work. Bartolini's insistence that the truth of nature was the path to beauty manifested itself in other ways. In 1840, Bartolini conducted a model class using a life model that is actually still famous and talked about at the Accademia di Firenze. Now, the common practice in the nude figure class was that the studies would sometimes come in the form of a pose based on a theme, right? So you set up a model in a pose, but he is an Apollo, he is this or that. So each student would create their work based upon that theme, and the particular theme that Bartolini chose in 1840 was that of the storyteller Aesop of the famous Aesop's Fables. The traditional description of Aesop himself states that he was a man of loathsome aspect, pot-bellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarvish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped, in short, a portentous monstrosity. Accordingly, Bartolini saw fit to hire a hunchback to model for the class, and this created an absolute sensation. The use of a disfigured model in the Accademia flew in the face of all notions of aesthetics and artistic endeavor held commonly, well, held commonly in all of Europe at the time. The incident became infamous all over Europe, in fact, and harsh criticism came from all quarters. As for Bartolini, this wasn't just an exercise in realism, but a public statement of his evolving aesthetic approach to art, which he himself summed up in a phrase which would become his personal motto. That phrase is, And when I say that Bartolini made this his motto, I mean it literally. Bartolini created a wax seal, a signet ring, and a heraldic banner, each of which depicting an emblem of a seated nude hunchback, and inscribed with the phrase, of course in Italian, and he who knows how to copy will be able to do everything. The hunchback in this emblem is strangling a donkey-headed serpent, and it's said that it represents the inept followers of academic classicism. In the other hand, the hunchback holds the mirror of truth into the face of the serpent. Now, this emblematic depiction of the hunchback and its motto was so close to Bartolini's heart that eventually he actually carved it into marble in the form of a stele, or sort of a small stone marker or monument, which today can be found in the Pitti Palace in Florence. Bartolini's adherence to the tenet of natural beauty was so aggressively progressive in Italy and so misunderstood that even ten years after his death, students from the Accademia di Firenze were sometimes dismissed by critics and salon judges as having been taught at the school of hunchbacks. For many others, though, Bartolini was a pioneer of a new way forward, taking a parallel path that was being taken by Francois Root up in Paris with his Neapolitan Fisher Boy, a synthesis of the ideal and the natural that hadn't been seen in European sculpture since the early Florentine Renaissance. And in Paris, this would quickly morph from romanticism into realism, but in the less progressive artistic climate of Florence, Lorenzo Bartolini's hybrid of naturalism and idealism would hold sway for most of the rest of the century. After Lorenzo Bartolini died in 1850, his studio as well as his unfinished works were put into the hands of his number one assistant Pasquale Romanelli. Romanelli finished the unfinished work of Bartolini and eventually the Romanelli family donated all of Bartolini's plaster casts to the city of Florence. The majority of these plaster casts today can be found in the Accademia di Firenze or more specifically in the Accademia Museum, the same museum which holds Michelangelo's David. Now for listeners who have been to the Accademia, you might know what I'm talking about. These plaster casts are all located in a single room off to the left of the David. So as you approach the David, there's that room at the left end of the hall. That is the Galleria Bartolini. Bartolini's eminence and example in Florence served as a backdrop for the sculptural scene in Florence for the first half of the 19th century and we'll talk more about Lorenzo Bartolini as he makes his appearance in the biographies of other sculptors like Giovanni Dupre or the American sculptor Horatio Grino and the Romanelli family of sculptors. But there is one aspect of his legacy that lives on right up to this day and that is the legacy of his sculpture studio and atelier at number 70 Borgo Sanfreddiano here in Florence. After Bartolini's death, the studio as I mentioned fell to Pasquale Romanelli who was to become the first of several generations of Romanelli sculptors who would all work there. The building is still owned by the Romanelli family and it's still full of sculpture. A few plaster casts from Lorenzo Bartolini can still be found there along with plaster casts and marbles and bronzes from all the Romanelli sculptors. And this atelier is also the location which was rented out to two young American painters back in the early 1980s, the painters Daniel Graves and Charles Cecil who opened up their own atelier, the Cecil Graves Studio, which ran for nine years. Dan Graves went on to found the Florence Academy of Art and Charles Cecil still operates his own atelier, the Charles H. Cecil Studio, in one half of the building while the other half is the gallery and studio of the sculptor Raffaello Romanelli. And it's within these walls of this historical atelier that I myself learned to sculpt. And for me personally, this experience of working in the same space as generations of sculptors before me and, you know, just silly things like spilling plaster all over the same floor that Lorenzo Bartolini probably did, you know, or when I worked as a model, you know, I posed in the same room that Bartolini's sitters did, you know, sitters like Lord Byron, Giacomo Rossini, and Leopold II. All this has had a profound effect on me. It led me to see that what I was doing was situated in a broader historical context and it sparked my interest in art history which has obviously grown into a passion which has not only led to this podcast but influences what I choose to sculpt. I am forever grateful for my time I spent at No. 70 Borgo San Frediano, Florence. Well, I want to thank you all once again for listening. Now don't forget you can check out additional content at the Sculptors Funeral YouTube channel or at our Facebook group page. And while you're on Facebook, you can join in the conversation there. You can ask a question, you can leave a comment about the podcast or about sculpture in general, you can post current events, post your work, and much more. 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