Lorenzo Bartolini

Lorenzo Bartolini was born in Savignano di Prato on January 7, 1777. He was a sculptor, considered the most important exponent of Italian purism. He himself writes his memoirs and thanks to them we know various information about his youth and his artistic training. He belonged to a family of humble origins. His father, Liborio Bartolini, was a farmer and his mother, Maria Maddalena Fabri, a peasant. As far as his training is concerned, we know that he was still a child when he returned to Florence, finding a job as a garzone in modest decorative sculpture works, and he attended for a short time the Academy of Fine Arts. In Prato he worked at the workshop of the brothers Giovanni and Pietro Pisani di Carrara, where he met the sculptor Trentino Giovanni Insomma, who can be considered his first teacher. In 1795 he moved to Volterra, where he worked first for the sculptor Valinteri and then at the service of the alabaster Cornei, who transmitted a contagious interest for the statuary and for the neoclassical taste, through the Sixty-Two by John Flaxman on the Iliad, on the Odyssey and on the tragedies of Aeschylus. Then he arrived in Paris in 1799, where he received in the atelier of David. Here he makes friends with Bergeret and Angres, in particular with the latter he bonded for half a century for artistic and character affinities. Remain the portraits of Bartolini made by the French painter. Instead of the Italian sculptor, we remember a bronze medallion of Angres in Paris around 1805. The three young men, leaving the master's commune, retire at the Convento delle Cappuccine in Rue de la Paix. In 1802 Bartolini had participated in the Prix de Rome competition and won the second prize with a relief depicting Cleobi and Bitene. With this recognition, a period of great professional affirmation was inaugurated for the artist, crowned by the first official commissions of his career, busts of which we remember one of Napoleon for the Louvre, and finally the bas-relief of the Battle of Austerlitz for the Colonne Vendôme, always in Paris, where he took part in the team of sculptors who made the spiral of 425 bronze plates designed by Bergeret. Thanks to the authoritative protection of Napoleon Bonaparte and the benevolence of his sister Elisa Baciocchi, Bartolini in 1807 was appointed director of the Academy of Carrara, in the Principality of Lucca and Piombino, led by Baciocchi and her husband Felice. This closeness to Napoleon made him hostile to a large group of artists who accused him of being infringed. Despite this, in 1812 he became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, where even here he did not have an easy life, as he found many hostilities both because of his past as a Bonapartist and for his growing aversion to Neoclassical taste. The Carita Educatrice was commissioned in 1817 and was probably completed between 1830 and 1834. The work presents very evident references to Raphael's compositions. The sculptor does not limit himself to the representation of nature in the perfection of its ideal forms, but supports the need for the study of nature in a veristic and realistic sense. In particular, in this work, naturalism is expressed in the softness of the cloth of the garment and in the child tenderly leaning on the mother. The Carita is represented as a young woman, around 25 years old, with a reserved and healthy appearance, and this allows her to perform her dual function. On the one hand, help in material life, represented by the child attracting nourishment from his breast. On the other, assistance in the intellectual path, symbolized by the young man standing, intending to read a papyrus under his benevolent but vigilant gaze. In 1833, the Marquise Rosa Trivulzio commissioned a sculpture from Bartolini. The woman asked the artist to represent her pain and her devotion to God, after the death of her husband. The theme of faith is made through the pure and innocent nudity of a young woman portrayed with a kiss, The work, called Fiducia in Dio, is a masterpiece of purist art, in which classicism and naturalism merge. The line is sinuous and harmonious, and represents exactly the concept of natural beauty, which for Bartolini was of fundamental importance. The Funeral Monument of the Countess Sofia Zamoyska, commissioned by Bartolini immediately after the death of the noblewoman, took place in Florence in 1837, highlights those details and those new features that characterized the sculpture of the 18th century, which became more and more attentive to reality. The niche is framed by a classic arch, and hosts in the center a roundabout with the Madonna and the Child, typical of the Quattrocentesca tradition. Bartolini places the deceased on the deathbed, represented with impious realism. In particular, the most crude aspects of the pain in the agony of the old countess are evoked both in the strong expressiveness of the face and in the disordered painting of the colt, worked with different techniques, in order to obtain a color effect. In 1839, at the age of 62, he became a sculpture teacher at the Academy of Florence, and even though he knew he was doing high-level works, Bartolini embraced with fervor the path of teaching, which he used to propose those purist theories of which he was a keen enthusiast. In the Star of the Globe, he wrote to him, Lezione del 1840, Tutta la natura è bella relativa al soggetto da trattarsi, e chi sa copiare, tutto saprà fare. Perciò l'artista sosteneva che la bellezza non risiedesse nel soggetto, ma nel modo di scolpirlo. Infatti, con le sue opere, documenta da un lato una certa morbidezza e purezza delle linee, dall'altro un grande verismo. Il realismo del Bartolini, anche nelle sue manifestazioni più esplicite, restò pur sempre nel fondo un realismo ben temperato, che non sapeva mai scrollarsi di dosso del tutto l'ombra lunga del sublime Ecanova, di cui fu il vero e più grande erede. Egli scomparve il 20 gennaio del 1850 a Firenze, nella sua casa di Borgo Pinti, stroncato da un attacco di febbre biliare.