Faces and Allegories. Sculptures by Lorenzo Bartolini

The exhibition Faces and Allegories. Sculptures by Lorenzo Bartolini, curated by Carlo Sisi, opened at the Luigi Rovati Foundation on Sept. 25.

In the works on display Bartolini provides an accomplished expression of the romantic experience of Italian purism(first half of the nineteenth century), of which he was one of the major interpreters, with its formal and spiritual return to fifteenth-century artistic idealism. The exhibition revolves around two themes: allegories and portraiture. On the opening day, the first lecture, led by Carlo Sisi, "Introduction to the Exhibition. Figures and Themes of the Romanticism". The exhibition is under the Patronage of the Lombardy Region.

The exhibition opens on the Piano Nobile with the marble sculpture entitled Carità educatrice (Charity), in its 1846 version. Bartolini was commissioned the original work by the Grand Duke Ferdinand III of Tuscany in 1817. Balancing naturalism and allegory, the sculpture depicts the twofold figure of a woman who “disconnects” herself from her natural beauty to embody the role of mother, carer, and educator of her children, in keeping with the civil requirements of that particular historical period, infused with the principles of the Restoration.

The Armoury Room, illustrates the complexity of the artist’s creative journey through these different dimensions, going from a first model, to prototypes, to the final work.

White Space hosts works representing the second cornerstone of the exhibition: Bartolini’s faces, portraits which reflect the artist’s in-depth research and sensitivity in connecting natural beauty with the existential beauty of his sitters, resulting from a study of the psychological physiognomy of his subjects. The synthesis between natural and ideal is here embodied by a combination of natural beauty and cultural transformation. The elegant and thorough rendition of hair and hairstyles in his female portraits – in the marble and plaster busts, complemented by a selection of photographic reproductions of other portraits by the artist – becomes a specific aesthetic, autonomous in generating lines and shapes, and also a way of bearing witness to a “secularised” aspect of social culture through the representation of a specific fashion.