Beni Culturali Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico ed Etnoantropologico per il Polo Museale della città di Roma

A Bandit Family in the Roman Countryside

Bartolomeo Pinelli, Famiglia di briganti - A Bandit Family
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 1184
Material and technique
Terracotta
Author
Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835)
Dating
1834
Dimensions
39x37x25 cm.
Origin
Donated by the 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. Besides the episodes taken from the life of the bandits, there are also pastoral scenes such as that shown here, small idyllic scenes whose iconography, at least in one case (PV1834), is quite close to that of the Holy Family in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

Cristiano Giometti 

Bibliography

A. Santangelo (ed.), Museo di Palazzo Venezia. Catalogo delle sculture, Rome 1954, p. 76; G. Incisa della Rocchetta (ed.), Bartolomeo Pinelli, Rome 1956, p. 198

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Page created 2009-01-15, last modify 2010-11-15