FABBRIS, GIUSEPPE. - Sculptor, b. at Nove di Bassano on 19 Aug. 1790, d. at Rome on 22 Aug. 1860. He studied in Milan with Gaetano Monti and at the Brera Academy, then in 1813 he moved to Rome, where he came into contact with Canova. Elected a member of the Academy of St. Luke in 1820, he was later president and perpetual regent of the Academy of the Virtuosi at the Pantheon and director general of the Vatican Museums.
Correct, cold, conventional, but undoubtedly an excellent connoisseur of ancient sculpture and of the craft, very well known and appreciated in his own time and then almost entirely fallen into oblivion, F. must be considered a typical representative of Roman sculpture of the generation after that of Canova, already turned in an academic and purist direction. Among his works are remembered: besides a statue of St. Napoleon for one of the spires of the cathedral of Milan (1811), a bust of G. G. Trissino on the Capitoline (1817), and still in Rome the tomb of Ugolino Mannelli Galilei in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, that of Msgr. Fontana in S. Carlo ai Catinari, the other of Countess Tornati Robilant in S. Andrea della Valle, the tomb of Leo XII in St. Peter's, the colossal statue of that Saint which is outside the basilica, and the tomb of Tasso in S. Onofrio. This last, among F.'s works, is perhaps the one that best represents the further development of his art, at the moment when, in the middle of the century, it turns, not without elegance, toward the Romantic taste.
Bibliography
Emilio Lavagnino