Dead Christ

Object belonging

One's own

Category

Terracotta sculpture

City

Rome

Location

Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia

Specific location

Room 24

Inventory

PV 10389

Material and technique

Terracotta/ paint

Author

Angelo Gabriello Piò (1690-1770)

Dating

c. 1730

Dimensions

18x40x23 cm. (Christ); 38x25 cm. (base)

Origin

Gorga Collection (1948)

Image copyright

SSPSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

Short description

This small terracotta depicts Dead Christ in the characteristic pose of the Pietà, immediately after the deposition from the cross. The dramatic effect of the composition is accentuated by the use of different colours, highlighting the paleness of the lifeless body and the blood surrounding the holes left by the nails in his hands and feet, and dripping from the wound on his chest. The loss of some fragments of the composition, particularly from the body of Christ, reveals a glimpse of the original pale pink colour of the clay. The statuette is mounted on a rectangular base that was, at an unknown date, inserted onto a wooden support, with gilded and moulded edges, almost certainly to ready the work for display. The origins of the piece, which became part of the Palazzo Venezia collection in 1948, together with the rest of the extraordinary collection of the opera singer Evan Gorga, are not known. But its style has led to it traditionally being attributed to the Bolognese sculptor Angelo Gabriello Piò, a skilled artist active in Italy for most of the 1700s. Piò was first a pupil of Andrea Ferreri and then Giuseppe Maria Mazza, the most noted Bolognese sculptor of the time, before finishing his training in Rome at the studio of Camillo Rusconi, where he arrived in 1718, armed with “many letters of recommendation from cardinals, gentlemen and other illustrious people, including one from Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole” (G.P. Canotti, Storia dell'Accademia Clementina, Bologna 1739).

Cristiano Giometti 

Bibliography

Unpublished