Libero Andreotti Lot n° 535

Bas-relief typical of the sculptor's style in its more "modernist" phase although mindful of high Renaissance examples, Spanking is, alongside other bas-reliefs such as. Woman and Child facing a small terrace (c. 1920), Perfect Gladness (c. 1919), and to the reliefs Woman Sleeping (1921), and Fishing (c. 1920), one of the finest examples of this technique in Italian sculpture of the time. The theme is in that genre of representations of "domestic life" dear to the sculptor parallel to civic and celebratory subjects. There is a plaster cast of this work in the Gipsoteca Libero Andreotti in Pescia (cat. p. 159, no. 4). Ornella Casazza (1992), in the card for the catalog, writes that "there is no news of castings or translations in marble, stone or terracotta" of this model, however, there appear to be existing in addition to the original plaster a terracotta specimen (private collection) and another bronze specimen, posthumous casting, formerly of the heirs, reproduced in Pandolfini Casa d'Aste, Paintings and Sculptures Ancient and of the 19th-20th Centuries, Florence, April 22-23, 2013, p. 313, lot 447. Reference bibliography: Gipsoteca Libero Andreotti, edited by Ornella Casazza, Pescia, 1992, (Toscana Musei), p. 159, no. 4. Libero Andreotti 1920