ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ponti Art Gallery offers a masterpiece by Innocenzo Fraccaroli, one of the most important sculptors lived in Italy along the 19th century.

As reported by Giulia Mori in her doctoral thesis (“La forma del fatato Achille”. La scultura di Innocenzo Fraccaroli– Università degli studi di Trento, 2015), the Venetian sculptor Innocenzo Fraccaroli participates in the exhibition of Brera in 1841 with three works “that qualify him as a distinguished artist”. As we learn from the review by Abbot Luigi Malvezzi, Milan restorer and collector, “the first consists of a kind little girl who makes the first offer, and this statue should be praised for the finiteness, the elegance of the forms and the ingenuity that communicates (Malvezzi 1842a).

The girl in the act of offering flowers was much appreciated also by Giuseppe Sacchi: “this work overcomes all praise, with the truth of thought, with the sweet ingenuity of expression, with the grace of the forms, the amiability of the moves and the softness of the meat.”(1841). For some traits, the sculpture could be identified with the “Child sitting with flowers” recalled by Innocenzo Fraccaroli in the autobiography: “The noble sig. Alessandro Alessandro Passalacqua ordered me the portrait of a little girl of about five years of age, I figured she sat on the ground with her joined hands filled with flowers, offering them as symbols of the fruits of her education” (BCVr, B. 184, Autobiography, [1880]).

Of the girl with flowers, the nephew Giuseppe Fraccaroli repeatedly asks the sculptor’s daughter, Rosa, because after having consulted a list of works, not received by us, drawn by the same artist, it is not clear to him the distinction between the commission sculpture by Passalacqua and a similar statuette made for the Buri family. From the correspondence between Giusepppe Fraccaroli and the daughter of the artist Rosa, it emerges, in fact, the existence of a further portrait of a child known as “Innocence” realized for the Buri family. To date, therefore, according to research conducted by Giulia Mori, in the sculpture presented here could be identified both the work created for the Passalacqua family and the Buri family.

Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, having as his teacher the sculptor Luigi Zandomeneghi, Fraccaroli successfully exhibited in Rome in 1833, after attending Thorvaldsen’s studio, the plaster of the “Wounded Achille”, whose marble version will be exhibited in 1842 at the Brera Academy in Milan, where Fraccaroli will continue his career with works of a predominantly mythological or allegorical subject, but also historical, as the group of “Atala and Chactas”, inspired by the novel by Chateubriand, made in 1846.