The Bandit's Farewell

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 1186

Material and technique

Terracotta

Author

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835)

Dating

1828

Dimensions

45x28x23 cm.

Origin

Acquired from Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant'Angelo (1920)

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. The first work to be modelled, in chronological order, is the group depicting The Bandit's Farewell, a snapshot of ordinary life in which the woman, with her child in swaddling clothes in her arms, tries to stall her companion, who is about to leave. The characteristic head covering of the woman means the characters can be traced to the small city of Sonnino, and the same family can be identified, this time at a moment of rest, in a terracotta signed and dated 1832, held at The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.

Cristiano Giometti 

Bibliography

A. Santangelo (ed.), Museo di Palazzo Venezia. Catalogo delle sculture, Roma 1954, p. 75; G. Incisa della Rocchetta (ed.), Bartolomeo Pinelli, Roma 1956, p. 196 no. VII