TOMASSO BROTHERS FINE ART

LORENZO BARTOLINI (1777 – 1850) (Attributed to)

ITALIAN, early 19th century

Bust Portrait of a Man

White marble

55.5 cm (21 ¾ in.) high 25 cm (9 ¾ in.) wide

Lorenzo Bartolini was a Florentine who left to study art in at a very young age. In Paris he made the acquaintance of both Ingres and David and soon came under the spell of . Bartolini earned a silver medal from the Académie for his relief of Cleobis and Biton and Baron Dominique Denon, the Inspector General of Paris Museums, commissioned him to sculpt a bust of for the column in the Place Vendôme, together with a relief of the Battle of Austerlitz. In 1808, the Emperor placed Bartolini in charge of his workshops at Carrara, and he remained there until Napoleon’s abdication, after which he returned to , taking an academy professorship. He was, in his own lifetime, regarded as one of the most important Neoclassical sculptors by critics and connoisseurs throughout Europe and the United States, where his work was admired and keenly sought.

This beautiful portrait of a young man, with deftly carved clumps of thick wavy hair and sharply incised eyes, is a fine example of the best portrait busts that were made during the early nineteenth century. It was a period when the work of Canova and Thorvaldsen cast a long shadow and the Neoclassical style they developed was the height of fashion. In general, both Canova and Thorvaldsen left the eyes of their blank, which created a somewhat more ‘immaterial’ representation of their subject and harked back to works made during the Roman Republic and the first century AD. Ancient Roman sculptors working in this period tended not to incise the iris and pupils because these were painted on – until the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, at the beginning of the second century, when sculptors began to incise these areas, which made their subjects somewhat more lively (Scherf 2007, p. 35).

The emergence of the all’antica portrait accompanied the renewed interest in ancient art that first arose in during the Renaissance. However, the zenith of its popularity was reached in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, following the widespread publication of J.J.Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Art of Antiquity) in 1764, which discussed and generated renewed interest in classical bust portraiture.

When one surveys the art of this period, it is clear that a major characteristic of it is the proliferation of the sculpted portrait bust. This was perhaps due to the belief that the bust form was more effective than the statue at explicitly making the link between the present and the classical past (Baker 2007, p. 212).

RELATED LITERATURE M. Tinti, Lorenzo Bartolini, 2 vols, Rome, 1936 G. Scherf, ‘Sculpted Portraits, 1770–1830: “Real Presences”’, in S. Allard et al. (eds.), Citizens and Kings, Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830, London, 2007, pp. 2–36 M. Baker, ‘The Portrait after the Antique’, in ibid., pp. 212–16 F. Falletti, S. Bietoletti and A. Caputo (eds.), Lorenzo Bartolini: Beauty and Truth in Marble, Florence, 2011