Lorenzo Bartolini. Scultore del Bello naturale

Bartolini, compared to Canova, is more projected in the future. In this sense, he started from a training received in Paris in the French period, very much based on neoclassicism. Bartolini just arrived in Florence, just arrived in Florence, so we are in the second decade of the 18th century, between 1815 and 1820, but even closer to 1815, he began to look, to study, and to be captured by the sculpture of the Florentine 400. Verrocchio, Donatello, even the painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, the first Raffaello, and this passion for the Florentine humanism naturally leads him to observe directly and closely nature as it is. In this, he stands out from neoclassicism. You can see it very well already from the exhibition, so we are in 1816, he begins to work with real models, something that neoclassical sculptors naturally did not do. You can see it very well already in his sculpture, and you will see it to the end of his life, with the nymphs, the nymph of the scorpion, the nymph of the snake, which were lent for this exhibition from the Louvre, how Bartolini really makes the flesh alive in marble, every detail, every fold of the surface of the body is observed by him on the model and brought back to the marble with a softness, a real similarity that still amazes today. In the last decade of his life, Bartolini finally had, even if he was given the wrong neck, the recognition he had been waiting for for all his activity, that is, he was appointed sculpture professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. But his very way of being so innovative, his way of putting the observation of nature first of all, gave him many contrasts within the academic environment which at the time was very closed and very linked to the neoclassical tradition. Bartolini, let's say, did not really try in any way to mediate, and this is typical of the great artist, the great artist cannot mediate, indeed he must always provoke. So much so that in a lesson that then became famous in August 1840, he made a gobbo come to pose, and this, which was then a lesson that aroused the disdain of the academic professors, instead became a point of reference, and then became a point of reference of Bartolini's aesthetic. Bartolini accompanied this lesson with a motto that said, all nature is beautiful relative to the subject to be treated. What does this mean? That beauty is not in the subject, but it is in the way of sculpting. This is really a Copernican revolution that will open up, you understand well, the consequences of the sculpture of the second half of the 18th century and then also to follow. So it was a very, very innovative position. To this controversial view of Bartolini, to this strong contrast with the academic environment, you can also refer, at least in part, and then of course there will be other factors to analyze, the oblivion in which his work fell after his death and instead the prevalence of Canova's work, who is of course also an excellent artist, but he was certainly an artist who responded best to the conservative logic of the academies.