A Shepherd Playing Music and a Sleeping Woman

Object belonging

One's own

Category

Terracotta sculpture

City

Rome

Location

Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia

Specific location

Stored at the Museo di Roma in Palazzo Braschi, floor II, room 35/B

Inventory

PV 10382

Material and technique

Terracotta

Author

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835)

Dating

1833

Dimensions

30x38x17

Origin

Evan Gorga Collection

Image copyright

SSPSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

Short description

Bartolomeo Pinelli’s reputation derives principally from his vast number of pictorial works inspired by Rome and from his tantalizing evocations of the city in numerous watercolours, drawings and prints. Just as important was his, albeit less numerous, production of terracottas, with which Pinelli worked from the start of his career, making around 30 small-scale sculptures, usually signed and dated. Oreste Raggi, the most important of Pinelli’s biographers, noted that the artist “made, in his final days, many small groups out of clay, depicting modern dress, which he sold, as usual, for an extremely modest price. […] His method of sculpting is pleasing because his spirit, his passion and his sure touch run through every work”. Pinelli had intended to make one hundred sculptures but only completed 29 and in 1834 he executed a series of engravings (groups modelled in terracotta by Pinelli and etched by the artist too). A significant nucleus of these works came to Palazzo Venezia at two different points: 6 sculptures were given by the Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo in 1920, while 4 others, which formed part of the collection of Evangelista Gorga, were acquired by the state in 1948. There are numerous pastoral scenes like the present work, idyllic little pictures whose iconography, in one case at least (PV 1834), is similar to that of the Holy Family in depictions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

Cristiano Giometti 

Bibliography

A. Santangelo (ed.), Museo di Palazzo Venezia. Catalogo delle sculture, Roma 1954, p. 76