BARTOLINI, LORENZO. — Sculptor, born at Savignano in 1777, died at Florence in 1850. He studied in Paris in David’s atelier; he was a companion of Ingres, and shared with the latter an aversion to classical statuary models and an admiration for the Italian artists of the fifteenth century; in Paris, where he remained from 1799 to 1808, after years of struggle and poverty, he succeeded in establishing himself to the point of obtaining Napoleon’s patronage. On returning to Italy, he first taught at the Carrara academy; both there and later in Florence (where, having overcome the hostility of his milieu, he obtained permission to teach at the academy in 1839), he fiercely opposed the classicism of the time, rejecting the study of ancient statues and advocating the imitation of nature.
In his works, however, and especially in those that brought him the greatest fame (La carità, in the Pitti Gallery in Florence, and La fiducia in Dio, in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum in Milan, both from 1836, cold and artificial in their purity and smoothness), he remained a prisoner of traditional schemes. He rarely managed to free himself from them: he did so in the funerary sculptures (the tomb of Countess Zamojska in S. Croce in Florence), and still more successfully in the statue of Machiavelli, in the portico of the Uffizi in Florence, in the highly esteemed self-portrait, and in the numerous busts (of Pius IX, Murat, Rossini, etc.), equally removed from academic taste and from crude realism. He had an extraordinarily vast output, for which, toward the end of his career, he employed numerous assistants, increasingly indulging in the classicism he had fought so strongly.