BARTOLINI, LORENZO. - Sculptor, born in Savignano in 1777, died in Florence in 1850. He studied in Paris in David’s studio; he was a companion of Ingres, and shared with the latter a dislike for classical statuary models and an admiration for 15th-century Italian artists. In Paris, where he remained from 1799 to 1808, after years of struggle and poverty, he succeeded in establishing himself and even obtained Napoleon’s patronage. Upon returning to Italy, he first taught at the Carrara Academy; and both there and later in Florence (where, after overcoming the hostility of the environment, he obtained in 1839 a teaching position at the Academy) he strongly opposed the classicism of the time, opposing the study of ancient statues and advocating imitation of nature.
In his works, however, and especially in those that most contributed to his fame (Charity, in the Pitti Gallery in Florence, and Trust in God, 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 these: he succeeded in doing so in funerary sculptures (tomb of Countess Zamojska in Santa Croce, Florence), and even more so in the statue of Machiavelli in the Uffizi portico in Florence, in the highly admirable self-portrait, and in numerous busts (of Pius IX, Murat, Rossini, etc.), which were distant from both academic taste and crude realism. He had a vast output, for which, in the final phase of his career, he relied on numerous assistants, increasingly indulging in the classicism he had so strongly opposed.