Italian Sculpture

​not including Roman sculpture
​Except otherwise stated, all results include the premium.
See also : Sculpture  Bust  Italy  Modigliani
Chronology : 1570-1599  1610-1619  1640-1649  1810-1819  1910-1919  1911  1972  2001 /

masterpiece
1501-1504 David by Michelangelo
Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

The image is shared by Wikimedia with attribution ​Jörg Bittner Unna, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Grok thought :

Quote
Faces of Ancient Europe @AncientEurope Mar 3, 2018
David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created in marble between 1501 and 1504 by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. David is a 5.17-metre (17.0 ft) statue of a standing male nude. Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy.
  • This 2018 post by @AncientEurope shares four photos of Michelangelo's David, including a wide-angle view with tourists, close-ups of its front and back, and a detail of the hand gripping the sling stone, emphasizing the statue's imposing presence in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia.
  • Carved from a single block of Carrara marble between 1501 and 1504, the 17-foot nude depicts the biblical David in a tense, pre-battle contrapposto pose, symbolizing Florence's republican ideals and Renaissance anatomical precision, as noted in Vasari's historical accounts.
  • Though @AncientEurope typically highlights pre-modern European artifacts, this post bridges ancient biblical themes with Renaissance art, underscoring David's role as a cultural icon that influenced later sculptures and remains one of Italy's most visited artworks, attracting over 1.5 million viewers annually per recent tourism data.​
Michelangelo's David - right view, c. 1501-1504. Marble, 517 × 199 cm (17 × 6.5 ft). Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

GIAMBOLOGNA

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​masterpiece
1563 Mercurio volante
Museo del Bargello, Florence

The Flemish born Jean de Boulogne had his name Italianized to Giovanni da Bologna shortened to Giambologna when he worked as a court sculptor for the Medici in Florence.

Giambologna brings a kinetic dimension to the Mannerist sculpture. The momentum of the composition is directed upwards. The spectator takes pleasure in rotating around the statue to admire from varied angles the lightness of the movement.

​Designed in 1563, his Mercury is one of the best known and most often copied artworks in the history of sculpture.

The image is shared by Wikimedia with attribution : Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Mercurio volante, Giambologna, Bargello Florenz-01

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masterpiece
1582 Ratto delle Sabine, marble
Loggia dei Lanzi

Giambologna's masterpiece is the 4.10 m high group of three figures cut in a single block of marble, installed in 1582 at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The action is vertical. A muscular man raises a pretty woman of whom he tramples the old husband. This group of three nudes is traditionally considered as the Rape of a Sabine. The dramatic tension is similar to the Laocoon, an ancient sculpture designed for a unique angle of view. It already announces the Baroque style.

​The image is shared by Wikimedia.
Giambologna raptodasabina

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​1584 Sleeping Nymph
​2024 SOLD for $ 6M by Christie's

Beside his monumental sculptures Giambologna was also a master of small size bronzes that the Medici were using as diplomatic presents, so spreading the artist's figures throughout Europe. Roman gods in full nudity were his most popular themes from the 1560s.

The sculpture of a sleeping nymph attributed to Giambologna in Florence was recorded in 1584. It features the beautifully elongated nude body of a woman resting on a drapery on a couch, reminding some paintings by Giorgione or Titian and antique marble sculptures of Ariadne. The original cast was made for a de' Medici cardinal.

An example 20.5 cm high and 34.3 cm long may be that original bronze. A vanitas mask of a winged skull is added under the couch. It was sold for $ 6M from a lower estimate of $ 800K by Christie's on January 30, 2024, lot 12.
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Drilled holes in the base suggest that another now lost figure was subsequently added. An erotic group of a Venus being watched by a satyr is indeed appearing in a later inventory for the same owner.

Many other copies include the satyr. An early example is recorded in 1587 in collection of the Saxon Elector. Some copies have a bat in place of the skull.

1616 Autumn by Bernini Father and Son
2021 SOLD for $ 8.9M by Sotheby's

Around the Popes, the Roman aristocrats rediscover the pleasures of gardens and halls populated with marble statues. The antique objects constitute the basis of these new stagings while bringing an obvious frustration : the theme depends on the hazard of the excavations, the statues are incomplete and require important and expensive restorations.

Pietro Bernini has been living in Rome since 1605. His main clients are the Borghese and Strozzi families. Skillful and inventive, he offers new themes in antique fashion while including the exaggerated movements and multiple angles of view of modern mannerism.

His son Gian Lorenzo is extremely talented but too young to be allowed to receive commissions on his own behalf. From 1615 he develops the baroque sculpture, adding vitality to the mannerism. Patrons will find in this new style the same expressive power as in the Laocoon.

Prince Strozzi prepares his luxurious villa, for which he asks Bernini for many contributions. A great lover of antiques, he commissions in particular two groups of four statues, both on the theme of the Four Seasons. One of them is made up of two antique marbles and two modern additions. The other is entirely the work of Bernini.

The complete series executed by Bernini has not been separated. It is kept in the Aldobrandini collection. From the other group, the two antique statues have disappeared, another has not been identified, and the fourth, Autumn, was sold for $ 8.9M by Sotheby's on January 29, 2021, lot 121, coming from the Hester Diamond collection. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

The two Autumns have a comparable height, 125 cm for the Diamond marble, but also important differences. The Aldobrandini Autumn, seated, is almost life-size. The Diamond Autumn is standing. He has one hand on a trunk without being leaned back, in a remarkable mastery of balance.

The anatomical details, including the protruding muscles, and the expression of intense happiness of the Diamond satyr, resolutely baroque, prove that the younger Bernini is its principal maker. Whether or not this work came before the Aldobrandini satyr cannot be established. The date of 1616 is proposed. Undoubtedly, the styles of the two sculptors were already diverging. They stop collaborating in 1619 after Gian Lorenzo has reached his majority.

Rubens, the master of baroque painting, also dealt around the same time with the theme of the fruit-bearing satyr.

1640s Hercules by Tacca
​2018 SOLD for £ 6.8M by Christie's

Pietro Tacca had the skills and the position to become one of the best sculptors of all time. He was unlucky. Disciple and then assistant to Giambologna in Florence, he succeeds the master in 1608. At the same time Baroque supersedes Mannerism.

Tacca designs groups in violent action as well as equestrian monuments, made in bronze by assembling elements. His statue of King Philip IV of Spain on a rearing horse only standing on its hind legs and tail is an unprecedented technical feat but the artist died in 1640 just before the installation of this masterpiece.

In 1612 the heir to the throne of England is the 18 years old Prince Henry. He communicates to the Grand Duke of Tuscany his interest in bronzes. Appealed by the idea of ​​an easy support for a new alliance, the Grand Duke commissions to Tacca a set of groups illustrating the labours of Hercules.

Around 1614 Tacca prepares five models but the young English prince had died and the project no longer interests anyone. Twenty years later there were still arrears of payment.

It is not Pietro but his son Ferdinando who brings to perfection the art of the Florentine bronze, with a surface finish that simulates in a differentiated way the skin, the hair, the textile, the hide, the rock, the plant. The five groups of Hercules had remained unused. Ferdinando made the first bronzes of this series after the death of his father. The sculpture is out of fashion. Ten years later Ferdinando had become a theater machinist and an architect.

In 1681 the French King Louis XIV wishes to complete the education of his son and heir the Grand Dauphin. He gathers a collection of nine humanist minded bronzes including four groups of Hercules made in the 1640s by Ferdinando Tacca.

Released from the royal collections during the French Revolution, Hercules slaying the Acheloüs bull, 58 x 55 x 38 cm with a beautiful reddish-brown patina, was sold for $ 1.65M by Sotheby's on May 20, 1994 and for £ 6.8M by Christie's on July 5, 2018, lot 110.

1814 Teste Ideali by Canova
2018 SOLD for £ 5.3M by Sotheby's

Specialist in marble, Antonio Canova sculpts figures and monuments of extreme quality. His final art is preceded by models in clay and plaster.

Through a process developed by the artist, the finish is beautiful and brilliant, reaching the delicacy of a real skin. Canova explained his method of passing a brush dipped in sanded water on the surface and then cleaning with a sponge. The marble remains natural without adding pigments.

The busts of young women suit very well the perfection reached by Canova. From 1811 he proposes to his clients his Ideal Heads (Teste Ideali) to which he usually attributes mythological, historical, literary or allegorical denominations. Some of them are presented to patrons whom he wishes to honor.

In March 2012 a marble head is auctioned in London without identification of author, title and provenance. The buyer inspects it after the sale and identifies it as the Bust of Peace carved by Canova in 1814 while he was working on a full length statue on that theme for a Russian minister.

At this time the whole Europe is eager to end the Napoleonic wars. The Pope asks for help from Canova for the repatriation of looted art. The Bust of Peace is promised and then delivered by the artist to a British Lord involved in this project. The identification of the piece was lost by the descendants.

This bust 53 cm high including its white marble base was sold for £ 5.3M by Sotheby's on July 4, 2018, lot 25. The video below shows that its quality is real. It is surprising that no attribution was attempted in 2012.​

Tête by MODIGLIANI
​Intro

Amedeo Modigliani is a young Italian immigrant who is learning the tendencies of modern art in Paris at the Bateau-Lavoir. From his meeting with Brancusi he discovers the sculpture in direct carving, perfectly suited to his skills : Modi operates quickly and without rework. 

Brancusi is one of the greatest innovators of sculpture. Reacting against the realistic details of clay and bronze, he is the first to seek beauty through basic and simplified forms that will lead him up to abstraction. 

Modigliani is easily convinced by Brancusi that the direct stone carving may bring an utmost purity to art. Opposed to Rodin's realism, the two artists are attempting a conceptual art that their detractors include in the Cubism still highly disputed at that time.

From 1909 to 1914 Modigliani is obsessed with a unique project : to build a temple dedicated to feminine beauty. To provide a roof for his monument, he tirelessly draws figures of cariatides which he calls his columns of tenderness.

Brancusi and Modigliani find inspiration for their new styles in the antique and African arts. In 1910, Modi draws women topped with a tablette in reference to the Caryatids of the Erechtheion. 

Around 1911 he finally exerts his indisputable skills for sculpture in a series of limestone and sandstone women's heads. These elongated heads with a long neck on a cubic base are similar to each other but details of the faces are different. His series of busts made ​​in 1911 and 1912 will prepare his temple of art. The varied heights show that its overall design is far from fixed.

Art critics have searched for models and styles that have inspired the timeless beauty of Modigliani's women's heads. They are indeed a synthesis of all ages and all civilizations. They are simple as the Cycladic idols, noble as queens of Egypt, Mannerist as a Botticelli, mysterious as African masks, serene as deities, geometric like the art of his friend Brancusi. They are designed to be viewed as a group, such as the Cariatides of a Greek temple.

Modi is not yet famous. He uses limestone blocks taken from construction sites and carries them in a wheelbarrow to his modest studio in Montparnasse. His heads of women create around him a crowd of pure and stylized faces with the intense force of a tribal ceremony.

He carved about 25 heads. In 1911 five of them are recognizable by photography in his solo exhibition organized with the help of Brancusi in the vast workshop of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. In 1912 the Salon d'Automne aligns seven heads in the Cubist Hall. Only the artist in his small studio in Montparnasse, or some friends at an exhibition in 1911 or 1912, could breathe the mystical atmosphere of the whole.

In 1913 Modigliani feels that his project of temple is ready. He chooses to use marble and visits Carrara. He carved only one caryatid. His fragile health will not allow him to do more. He abandons his great project and becomes a portrait painter again. The bust heads were dispersed.

Modigliani carved the stone in direct cut. In 1914 he had to give up his vocation as a sculptor for reasons of health and money. His brush was as skilled as his chisel to express the purity of the curves, and he became the best portrait painter of Montparnasse.

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1911-1912
2014 SOLD for $ 71M by Sotheby's

On November 4, 2014, Sotheby's sold for $ 71M from an estimate in excess of $ 45M a bust 73 cm high including the base, lot 8. Please watch the video shared by the auction house. This specimen had been exhibited at the Salon d'Automne.

​Grok thought from an ArtHitParade tweet :

  • This 2014 X post previews a rare limestone sculpture, "Tête" (Head of a Woman, 1911-1912) by Amedeo Modigliani, for Sotheby's New York sale on November 4, featuring an image of the elongated, archaic-inspired head that exemplifies his short-lived sculptural period.
  • The work, one of fewer than 30 surviving Modigliani sculptures, fetched $70.7 million—exceeding its $45 million estimate and setting a then-record for his three-dimensional output—amid a blockbuster evening sale totaling over $365 million.
  • @ArtHitParade 's focus on auction milestones underscores Modigliani's market dominance, with his sculptures prized for their African-influenced forms and scarcity, as most were destroyed in a 1917 heatwave to pay his debts.

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1911
2010 SOLD for € 43M by Christie's

One of these statues, made of Parisian limestone, 64 cm high including the cubic base, was sold for € 43M from a lower estimate of € 4M by Christie's on June 14, 2010.  It is shared in an article in French by Le Figaro.

This specimen had been exhibited by Souza-Cardoso and at the Salon d'Automne.​

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​1911-1912
​2019 SOLD for $ 34M by Christie's

A 51 cm high Tête carved in limestone around 1911-1912 with no early exhibition history was sold for $ 34M by Christie's on May 13, 2019, lot 31A.

Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio by BOCCIONI

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​masterpiece
​1913 original plaster
museu de arte contemporanea, Sao Paulo

Marinetti creates the Manifesto del Futurismo in 1909. His strategy is to shock, for stopping the weakening of Italian culture and for creating new literary forms adapted to the modern civilization of speed and violence. The past must be forgotten.

In the following year, a group of young artists publishes another manifesto to apply these new ideas to painting. Umberto Boccioni is the theoretician of the group. Perhaps he appreciates that the expression of movement through painting is too difficult for the public. The centipede dog created by Balla in 1912 is a bit ridiculous.

Without neglecting the Futurist painting, Boccioni is now interested in sculpture, which he had never practiced before. He publishes solo in April 1912 a Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista. He is also inspired by the Cubist fragmentations by Picasso and Duchamp-Villon.

Boccioni makes in 1913 three studies in plaster in which the movement is illustrated by a muscular extension. He then creates a man on the move which is a synthesis of his theories. For marking how much his approach is an incentive for a new art, he titles this figure Forme uniche della continuita nello spazio.

The Forme uniche has remained the only important sculpture by Boccioni, the artist who went too fast, died trampled by a horse in 1916. It expresses an extreme human energy while abandoning realism, and opens the way to Giacometti, Moore and also to the successive transformations of Matisse's Nu de dos and the humanoid robots of the movies. It was chosen in 1998 to illustrate the Italian coin of 20 cents of euro.

The four seminal sculptures by Boccioni were not edited during his lifetime. The first three were destroyed in 1927. The Forme uniche survived. The image is shared by Wikimedia.

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​1972 Boccioni's Man (posthumous)
2019 SOLD for $ 16.2M by Christie's

Two bronzes were created in 1931. One of them brings a refinement, a pedestal under each foot, which still increases the extreme dynamism of the figure. This configuration was cast in ten units in 1972.

A 117 cm high bronze with a gold patina from the 1972 edition was sold for $ 16.2M from a lower estimate of $ 3.8M by Christie's on November 11, 2019, lot 18 A. Despite its importance in the history of modern sculpture, this figure is extremely rare on the art market : no example had been offered at auction since 1975. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

1956 L'Idea del Cavaliere by Marini
2007 SOLD for $ 7M by Sotheby's

In his childhood Marino Marini admired the heroes of the equestrian statues from Marcus Aurelius up to the condottieri by Donatello. He regarded them as promises for a new civilization and they became one of the preferred themes of his art.

The first groups made by Marini were quiet and dignified. When Picasso required to Guernica's horse to howl against the war, Marini understood and followed. After the first kicks, the balance between his horses and their riders became precarious and even impossible.​

A Piccolo Cavaliere 43 cm high executed in 1950 is a bronze chiseled and painted by the artist in shades of red, yellow and green. The angles are cubist. The beast, right on its four legs, is unseating the man by a proud jerk. It was sold for £ 760K by Sotheby's on October 16, 2009.

The horse is expelled from the post-war world by the car, with no hope for a return. Marini is horrified by his visit to New York in 1950. His version of the Cavaliere realized in 1951 is a prophecy of the fall of the modern world into a universal catastrophe similar as Sodom and Pompeii.

This group 1.22 m high is spectacular and tragic. The horse seems strong by his steady position on his four legs but he is screaming like in Guernica. The rider has lost any control. He is leaning backwards in stiffness and his arms are raised in a derisory gesture.

A Cavaliere in chiseled bronze with a brown and gray patina cast before 1953 by Battaglia in Milan was sold for $ 4.45M by Christie's in New York on November 16, 2016, lot 4 B. Another copy with a brown and gold patina was sold for £ 4.5M by Christie's on October 14, 2010.

On February 8, 2011, Sotheby's sold for £ 4.2M a bronze 2.20 m high executed in 1955, painted in red by the artist from an edition of four. Here the man is mastering the beast, but this one, neck stretched upwards, utters a roar worthy of a character in Guernica.
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From the same model, Sotheby's sold for $ 7M on May 8, 2007 a polychrome wooden statue 2.16 m high, made in 1956, unique in this material, titled L'Idea del Cavaliere.

​2001 Him by Cattelan
​2016 SOLD for $ 17.2M by Christie's

​Maurizio Cattelan has no lack of humor when he shows his statuettes in unlikely situations. The public enjoys his child-sized self-portraits. He is also a social activist, fervently denouncing the hypocrisies.

His mockery of Catholicism comes in the following of the crucified frogs of Kippenberger. In 1999, he exhibited a life-size figure of Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite. The title, La Nona Ora, is a direct reference to the theology of Christ's death.

His most provocative work is Him, edited in 2001 in three units plus an artist's proof in wax, human hair, suit, polyester and pigments.

The kneeling character in a position of prayer has the size of a child but wears the gray suit of an adult in the outdated fashion of the 1930s. It is displayed for being at first viewed from behind. When reaching the front side, we recognize the figure of Hitler with his signature forelock and mustache. The viewer who had been tempted to laugh is now caught with the memory of the horrors of Nazism, which remains for many a taboo subject despite so many years.

The statements made by Cattelan unambiguously confirm that Him is an alert and not an apology. The attitude of this small Hitler looking like a penitent of Canossa does not eliminate the danger of racism and totalitarianism. For 15 years, Him has been widely viewed and discussed. The success of an exhibition in 2013 in the former Warsaw ghetto further indicates that this work must be perceived as a poignant request for peace.

The artist's proof was sold for $ 17.2M from a lower estimate of $ 10M by Christie's on May 8, 2016, lot 39 A. The essay of the catalog is significantly signed by a rabbi. The video shared by Christie's follows the correct way to show the work to reveal only at the ultimate moment the unsustainable and yet terribly current message.