TENERANI, PIETRO. - Sculptor b. at Torrano near Carrara on 11 Nov. 1789, d. at Rome on 14 Dec. 1869.
Started in art by his uncle Pietro Marchetti, he was then at Carrara a pupil of Bartolini. In 1813, having won the pensionato, he went to Rome to study at the Accademia di S. Luca where Thorwaldsen taught; but his temperament pushed him to follow rather the manners of Canova, for his aspiration was not to stiffen forms in the imitation of the antique, but rather to resolve them into a grace even of smooth surfaces, sensitive to the delicacies of sfumato.
This is reflected in his youthful works such as the group Venus and Cupid, whose original plaster is in Rome in the Gipsoteca Tenerani, and in the Abandoned Psyche (Palazzo Lenzoni, Florence). In 1823 T. made a journey to Florence where he met Bartolini again. However, this new encounter did not gain him the possibility of freeing himself from the conformisms of the Roman academy, although, advancing cautiously along those tracks, he showed, after the Florentine journey, that he wished gradually to replace the elements drawn from the study and imitation of the antique with those that derived from the imitation and study of the fifteenth-century sculptures he had before his eyes in Rome, where he had soon returned. Thus, almost imperceptibly, what evolved was not his plastic style but his manner of depicting images, no longer disguised in heroic fashion with togas, chlamyses and cuirasses, but represented with expressions similar to those of the smooth fifteenth-century sculpture of Bregno and his pupils. This allowed him to subscribe in 1840 to the famous manifesto of "Purism" (v.) and to take part with his works in the controversy over how to dress modern figures in sculpture. In this controversy he posed as an anti-classicist, having Ferdinand II (1840), which was at Messina, Simon Bolivar, planned for Bogotá (1842), and Pellegrino Rossi, of Carrara and of the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (1854), wear the clothes of their own time. Of this middle period of T.'s activity the best thing is the great relief with the Deposition that is found in the Torlonia chapel in S. Giovanni in Laterano. Other works of his are: the sculptures of the Lante chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva, the monument to Pius VIII in S. Peter's, the St. Benedict in the chapel dedicated to that Saint in the basilica of S. Paul in Rome, the Constabili tomb in the cemetery of Ferrara, the monument containing the heart of Simon Bolivar at Bogotá (1852), the Pelzer tomb in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome (1852) and some portraits among which are remembered, besides those that appear in the various funerary monuments, that of Princess Wolkonski of the Gallery of Modern Art also in Rome.
They are, in the last analysis, the best things of the sculptor and earn for T. a place if not exactly in the first rank, certainly a distinctive one in the dense host of practitioners of the plastic art in Rome in the first half of the nineteenth century.