Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bartolini

Alternative Surname

First Name

Lorenzo

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1777

Flourished

Year of Death

1850

Biographical Details

A Florentine sculptor, his studio attracted large numbers of British visitors between 1815 and 1824. His early works are neoclassical in style, but while in Paris at the turn of the century he developed an interest in the art of the Quattrocento and his later works combine neoclassical and neorenaissance elements with a strong taste for naturalism.
He was born near Prato, in Tuscany, on 7 January 1777, the son of a blacksmith. The family moved to Florence and he was there employed as a craftsman in various workshops before moving to Volterra in 1795, where he worked in the studio of the French sculptor Barthélemy Corneille (c1760-1812). In 1799 he went to Paris, where he studied under Pierre-Jean David. He won the Prix de Rome in 1802 with a relief of Cleobis and Briton (plaster fragment, priv coll, Italy) and undertook several commissions for the Napoleonic government, including a bronze relief of the Battle of Austerlitz for the Vendome Column (destroyed 1871). In 1807 Elisa Bonaparte appointed him professor of sculpture at the Accademia di Carrara and in 1810 he received an important commission for a colossal, semi-nude marble statue of Napoleon for Livorno. Completed in 1814, as the French empire crumbled, it was rejected and remained in the sculptor’s studio for many years, before it was finally erected at Bastia, Corsica, in 1854. In 1814 Bartolini followed Napoleon into exile on the island of Elba, before settling in Florence some time after 1815.
As a Bonapartist Bartolini was excluded from public and grand ducal commissions for some years, but made a living with private commissions for portrait busts and statues, including a number of British travellers. After visiting his studio in 1817, Henry Matthews wrote, ‘Bartolini is an excellent workman and takes admirable likenesses … It is now the fashion among the English to sit to him; - and you find all your acquaintances drawn up in fearful array, in hard marble; - some at full length!’ (Matthews 1820, cited by JKB 1978, 1655). His subjects included Lord Byron, who agreed to sit for Bartolini on condition that he also modelled a bust of Byron’s mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli (25, 27). The poet was unimpressed by his portrait, which he described as resembling a ‘superannuated Jesuit’ before adding ‘though my mind misgives me it is hideously like. If it is I cannot be long for this world, for it overlooks seventy’ (Marchand 1973-94, vol 9, 213).
Bartolini was also involved in the lucrative trade in copies of ancient and modern sculpture. In 1817 Matthews observed, ‘Casts have been imported from London of busts of the King, Fox, Pitt, Nelson, Perceval, and many others. Bartolini reproduces in marble, and sends back to London, all expenses of carriage included, for twenty-two pounds each’ (Matthews 1820, in GPC). In this area of his business Bartolini collaborated with other workshops, displaying their products for sale at his premises and taking a share of the profits in return. The 6th Duke of Devonshire purchased reproductions for Chatsworth (6, 32, 40, 41).
During this period Bartolini secured several commissions for ideal works which greatly enhanced his reputation in Italy and abroad. These included a Reclining Venus after Titian’s famous painting in the Uffizi, executed around 1822 for the 3rd Marquis of Londonderry, and a Reclining bacchante commissioned by the Duke of Devonshire in 1822 (7, 9). He seems to have had little involvement with British patrons after the mid-1820s, perhaps because he was able to attract more prestigious commissions from such grandees as the Duke of Tuscany and Prince Anatole Demidov. His most famous work, a kneeling adolescent female nude entitled Trust in God, was commissioned by the Milanese Marchesa Poldi Pezzoli in memory of her husband (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, 1834-6). Towards the end of his career Bartolini executed a number of funerary monuments for the church of Santa Croce in Florence, including a tomb for the Polish Countess Sophia Zamoyska, erected in 1844.
By the time of his death, on 20 January 1850, he was recognised as a leading European sculptor. A large collection of plaster models from his studio, comprising around 300 models for portrait busts and almost all of the models for his most important funerary and ideal sculptures, is preserved in the gallery of the Accademia de Belle Arti in Florence. His work has attracted considerable scholarly attention in Italy and France but is less well-known in Britain.
EH
Literary References: Gunnis 1968, 41; JKB 1972 (3), 328, 331; Penny 1977, 73, 89, 206 n 30; JKB 1978, 1655-6; Grove 3, 1996, 294-7 (Spalletti); Passeggia 2000, 167-8; Sicca and Yarrington 2000, 12, 13; Encyc Sc, vol 1, 134-5 (Cinelli)
Archival References: GPC
Collections of Drawings: Museo Comunale, Prato, Italy; Uffizi, Florence, Italy
Portraits of the Sculptor: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1806, Musée Ingres, Mountauban, France; Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, oil on canvas, 1820, Louvre, Paris, France; Pasquale Romanelli, posthumous marble bust, 1854, collezzione comunali, Prato (repr Bartolini 1978, 302)