Lorenzo Bartolini raccontato da Cecilie Hollberg direttrice della Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze

Welcome to the Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze. We are here in the gypsum workshop dedicated to Lorenzo Bartolini, who was born near Prato in 1777. Bartolini soon became interested in sculpture and, among other things, he was also very interested in Napoleon Bonaparte. Let us remember that Europe in this period is shocked not only by the French Revolution, but also by Napoleon Bonaparte himself. So Bartolini enlisted in the French army to go to Paris after the battle and work in the studio of the famous painter Jacques-Louis David. With him there is the artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, with whom he made friends and left the Maestro's Commune to open his own studio. Bartolini participated in the famous Prix des Hommes competition, in which he won the second prize. With this he managed to attract attention and was given a commission by the director of the Grand Museum of Paris, the Louvre. In 1807 Bartolini was called to Carrara by Napoleon's sister Elisa Paciocchi to be the director of the Academy of Fine Arts. Bartolini's life seemed to be a success after another, if not in 1813 with the Battle of Nipsia Napoleon was defeated. With this, obviously, the Bonapartists no longer had a good game and Bartolini flees from Carrara, where all his works are destroyed in the studio, and flees to Florence. But in Florence no one gives him a commission since he is a Bonapartist. He begins to make the first commissions with the tourists, the tourists of the Grand Tour, who are usually Russians, English and Spaniards at the beginning. Gradually he manages to have a great fame because he becomes famous and admired to have these faces, to create these expressive and full of emotions faces, so he later becomes a sculptor for funerary monuments. His story, however, always wants to take him to the Academy of Fine Arts, which is right here, behind this wall, and finally in 1839 they gave him the cathedral for sculpture. He made a scandal there, bringing as a model a gobbo, a gobbo man, until that moment everyone always brought beautiful girls from the countryside, while Bartolini said no, this among the gobbos was the most beautiful, and I really want the students to learn to do even what is not foreseen. And so he has a whole other approach. In 1850 Bartolini dies, his studio remains there, and then, after the proclamation of the Italian Republic, in 1884, the Italian state buys the entire content of this studio and deposits it in the monastery of San Salvi. Unfortunately, in 1966, with the great flood in Florence, all these cemeteries are attacked by water, and then later, in the 1970s, there was a great restoration project financed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and with these restorations we are now able to represent the cemeteries that at the time were exposed in the meadow, and after that, looking for a new location, they found a new house here in the gallery of the Academy of Florence. And I would say that Bartolini is not only an exquisite artist, but he is really an artist that must be known, because near Canova he is the most important sculptor of the 18th century in Italy.