lo scultore dei volti e dell'anima

Hello everyone, we are in Prato and even today this city will give us the opportunity to meet an interesting artist. Today we are talking about Lorenzo Bartolini. This artist was born in 1777 in Savignano, today a fraction of Vaiano in the province of Prato, from a family of very modest origins. In fact, his father, Liborio Bartolini, was a blacksmith. Lorenzo tells us in his memories that as a child he moved to Florence at the age of 8, where his father opened his first shop in Borgomissanti. He thought of using it both as a small factory and putting it on the mantis to feed the fire, something that did not go well with him, he writes. Giuseppe Rovani, an 800-year-old writer and publicist, writes of Lorenzo Bartolini's father who, seeing his son so averse to art by Fabbro Ferraio, took him so much in hatred that he brutally hit him every time he saw him abandon hammer and file to distract himself with drawing. In his poor and sad childhood he developed a lot of melancholy and at the same time he became increasingly attracted to art. He went to work in a sculptor's shop and there he met the artist Trentino Giovanni Insom, appreciated as a plasterer and marble sculptor, who grew up artistically in the Fiorentina Academy of Arts and died in Florence. An artist who can be considered in all respects his first teacher. He later continued his training in Volterra until, following Napoleon, he decided to retire to France by enlisting in the army. At 22, without money or support, in Paris, he was welcomed by Jacques-Louis David's studio, thus escaping the harsh fate of an artisan to whom Florence would inevitably have destined him. It was precisely in this context that Bartolini also met the French Jean-Auguste Menikangre, a painter with whom he established a deep relationship of mutual esteem and friendship destined to last over time. His greatest notoriety, however, came with Napoleon Bonaparte, who appreciated him a lot and kept him under his authoritative protection, along with that of his sister Elisa Vaciocchi, to whom Lorenzo also made a sculpted portrait. In 1807, Bartolini was appointed director of the Academy of Carrara's School of Sculpture, because Elisa Vaciocchi was in those years Duchess of the Territories of Lucca, Massa and Carrara, and she wanted to make the small Tuscan town of Carrara a global pole of production, creation and dissemination of marble and sculpture. Bartolini therefore lived in Carrara for a while, but to tell the truth, without great enthusiasm. The close relationships he maintained with the artistic and cultural circles near Napoleon, in fact, made him hostile to a large number of artists, who accused him even of being a little too French, to the point that he seemed to have forgotten Italian in his speeches, because every three words one was in French. He then returned to work in Florence around 1915, but he did not have an easy life here either. He found a lot of hostility, both because of his past as a Bonapartist and for his growing aversion to neoclassical taste. At the age of 54, Bartolini married Marianna Virginia Boni, from whom he had four children, Gerolamo Napoleone, Paola Napoleona, Giulia Rosa and Matilde Maria. At the age of 62, he finally became a sculpture professor at the Academy of Florence, thus managing to cover a chapter that many years later was precluded from him, and in these years his fame was now completely consolidated. Lorenzo Bartolini died on 20 January 1850 in Florence, in his house in Borgo Pinti, choked by a biliary fever attack. He was buried in the San Luca Chapel at the Holy Annunciation of Florence, a chapel that is a real gem of the Florentine 500, where you can find very important frescoes. A chapel also called the Painters' Chapel, because here you can find many artists buried, from Pontormo to Cellini, from Montorsoli to Andrea Sansovino, and even Rodolfo Siviero, our 007 of Italian art, who took care of the recovery of many works stolen by the Nazis in the Second World War. He too had a worthy burial right here. Lorenzo Bartolini, although coming from a solid neoclassical background, is considered the most representative exponent of purism, imposing his free spirit more and more. The artist stated, in fact, that he was looking for beauty outside the rigorous academic schemes, precisely in the inimitable nature and in the true. Nature, in particular, according to Bartolini, is the origin of life and of every creative activity. It goes before everything else, and this means that the artist's purpose is to find beautiful and pleasant corners of nature to copy in his own works of art. He was also very much appreciated as a portraitist, receiving commissions from the most important European personalities in the field of politics, music and literature, portraying his characters with great realism, but also with subtle psychological finesse. The beauty of his works is, in fact, not so much in the subjects, although beautiful, but in the way of discovering them. His art was considered unique. An opera by Bartolini, on which we will focus today, is this, entitled La fiducia in Dio. It is a white marble statue, 93 cm high, an opera from 1833, preserved at the Pol di Pezzoli Museum in Milan, although today we will observe a much smaller copy nearby, present at the Palazzo Alberti Museum in Prato. The original sculpture was commissioned by the Marquise Rosina Tribulzio, already portrayed in 1828 by Bartolini in a bust. The woman asked the artist to represent her pain and her devotion to God after the death of her beloved husband. Therefore, Bartolini decided to represent this affliction as a young naked woman with her hair in a chignon, clasped and with her hands intertwined and tied in a wreath, as a sign of deep prayer. Her mouth is closed and her eyes are turned upwards, as a sign of devotion. The total nudity of the woman, on the other hand, represents the purity of love that bound the Marquise Rosina to the beloved deceased spouse, and symbolizes how the death of the latter had left her naked in the face of a sudden and brutal separation. The line of this female figure is sinuous and harmonious, and the statue well represents the concept of beauty and nature that for Bartolini was of fundamental importance. And after meeting this extraordinary artist, I just have to say goodbye to you. Ciao a tutti from Palazzo Alberti in Prato. Ciao a tutti dalla Vecchia Gio'