TENERANI, PIETRO. — Sculptor, b. at Torrano near Carrara on 11 November 1789, d. at Rome on 14 December 1869.
Introduced to art by his uncle Pietro Marchetti, he later studied under Bartolini at Carrara. In 1813, having won the scholarship, he went to Rome to study at the Accademia di S. Luca, where Thorwaldsen taught; but his temperament inclined him rather to follow Canova’s manner, owing to his aspiration not to stiffen forms through imitation of antiquity, but to resolve them into a grace also of polished 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 again encountered Bartolini. Nevertheless, this renewed meeting did not enable him to free himself from the conformities of the Roman academy, although, cautiously advancing along those lines, after the Florentine journey he showed that he wished gradually to replace the elements derived from the study and imitation of antiquity with those deriving from the imitation and study of fifteenth-century sculptures that he had before his eyes in Rome, where he had soon returned. Thus, almost imperceptibly, what evolved was not his sculptural style but his manner of depicting figures: they were no longer heroically disguised in togas, cloaks, and cuirasses, but represented with expressions similar to those of the polished fifteenth-century sculpture of Bregno and his pupils. This enabled him to sign in 1840 the famous manifesto of «Purism» (v.) and to participate through his works in the controversy over how modern figures should be dressed in sculpture. In this controversy he assumed an anticlassicist stance by clothing Ferdinando II (1840), which was in Messina, Simone Bolivar, designed for Bogotá (1842), and Pellegrino Rossi of Carrara and the Galleria di arte moderna in Rome (1854) in the dress of their own time. The finest work of this middle period of T.’s activity is the large relief of the Deposition in the Torlonia chapel in S. Giovanni in Laterano. Other works by him include the sculptures in the Lante chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva, the monument to Pius VIII in S. Pietro, the S. Benedetto in the chapel dedicated to that saint in the basilica of S. Paolo in Rome, the Constabili tomb in the cemetery of Ferrara, the monument containing the heart of Simone Bolivar in Bogotá (1852), the Pelzer tomb in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome (1852), and several portraits, among which, in addition to those appearing in the various funerary monuments, is the portrait of Princess Wolkonski in the Galleria d'arte moderna, also in Rome.
Ultimately, these are the sculptor’s finest works and earn T. a place—if not precisely a leading one, certainly a distinctive one—among the numerous practitioners of sculpture in Rome during the first half of the nineteenth century.