Pio Fedi (1816 Viterbo-1892 Firenze), Allegoria... Lot n° 8

inscription on the base "Pio Fedi sculpted in Florence 1869".The refined work, in which the purity of form is already evident in the shining transparencies of the immaculate whiteness of Carrara marble, depicts a harmonious image of a little girl with small butterfly wings and silky curls held back by a ribbon that frame her innocent face as she sits on a cushion of lilies, thus revealing the allegorical metaphor, and is masterfully sculpted in the manner of a yearning romanticism still permeated by neoclassical sentiments. The evocative composition is an autograph work by the sculptor Pio Fedi (Viterbo 1816 - Florence 1892), one of the greatest artists of the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy, trained between Rome and Florence alongside important masters such as Pietro Tenerani (Carrara 1780 - Rome 1889) and Lorenzo Bartolini (Vernio 1777 - Florence 1850), who chose Florence as his city of adoption and where he opened his studio in Via dei Serragli in the former church of the monastery of Santa Chiara around 1842.During his fortunate artistic career he received important public and private commissions both at home and abroad, such as the statues of Niccolò Pisano (1849) and Andrea Cisalpino (1859), exhibited in the portico of the Uffizi, entrusted to him by Grand Duke Leopold II, or the funerary monument for a daughter of Princes Leov in the cemetery of St. Petersburg depicting a Guardian Angel dated 1852. But without a shadow of a doubt his masterpiece is the Rape of Polissena, a monumental group executed between 1860 and 1865 and placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria next to works such as Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women and Cellini's Perseus as a sort of preservation of Fedi in the Tuscan artistic empyrean; and it was just a few years after reaching his sculptural peak that the artist executed, signed and dated, the refined and intimate allegory of innocence, W. 36 - D. 48 - H. 65 cm, Massimo Vezzosi, Florence