FABBRIS, GIUSEPPE. - Sculptor, born at Nove di Bassano on 19 August 1790, died at Rome on 22 August 1860. He studied in Milan under Gaetano Monti and at the Accademia di Brera, then in 1813 moved to Rome, where he came into contact with Canova. Elected an academician of S. Luca in 1820, he later became president and perpetual rector of the Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon and director general of the Vatican Museums.
Correct, cold, conventional, but undoubtedly an excellent connoisseur of ancient sculpture and of his craft, very well known and appreciated in his day and later almost entirely forgotten, Fabbris should be regarded as a typical representative of Roman sculpture in the generation following that of Canova, already tending toward academicism and purism. Among his works may be recalled, besides a statue of St. Napoleon for one of the spires of Milan Cathedral (1811), a bust of G. G. Trissino on the Capitoline (1817), and, again in Rome, the tomb of Ugolino Mannelli Galilei in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, that of Mons. Fontana in S. Carlo ai Catinari, that of Countess Tornati Robilant in S. Andrea della Valle, the tomb of Leone XII in S. Pietro, the colossal statue of that Saint outside the basilica, and the tomb of Tasso in S. Onofrio. The latter, among Fabbris’s works, is perhaps the one that best represents the further development of his art, at the point when, in the middle of the century, it turned, not without elegance, toward Romantic taste.