Buste de Flore

GIOVANNI MARCHIORI (CAVIOLA D'AGORDO 1696-1778 TRÉVISE)
Buste de Flore
terre cuite, sur un socle en noyer sculpté, Italie, XVIIIe siècle
H. 38,8 cm (15¹⁄₄ in.) ; H. totale 52 cm (20¹⁄₄ in.)

BIBLIOGRAPHIE COMPARATIVE :
C. Semenzato, La scultura veneta del seicento e del settecento, Alfieri, 1966, pp. 59 à 62.
J. Höfle (éd.), Francesco Robba and the Venetian sculpture of the eighteenth century : Papers from an International Symposium Ljubljana, Rokus, 2000, pp. 125-135.
Cat. expo. Éblouissante Venise : Venise, les arts et l'Europe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Grand Palais, 2018, p. 113 et cat. 81.

A TERRACOTTA BUST OF FLORA, BY GIOVANNI MARCHIORI (CAVIOLA D'AGORDO 1696-1778 TREVISO)

Giovanni Marchiori began his career in Venice in 1708. Then a woodcarver, he signed an apprenticeship contract with Guiseppe Fanoli and started his career in 1725 with his first commissions. Considered one of the most cultured and intellectual artists of his time, Marchiori took academicism to the highest level, combining his knowledge of the Antiquities and his most illustrious contemporaries. It was in the early 1740s that the sculptor achieved real success, thanks to prestigious patrons. This turning point in his career was accompanied by a stylistic shift. Marchiori gradually abandoned Baroque codes in favour of a revival of classical forms and ancient purity, as seen in his lines, the perfection of turned faces and half-open lips. In this, the sculptor embodies the transition between the Baroque and an emerging neo-classicism, becoming a pivotal figure in the history of Venetian art.
Marchiori produced Flora, our terracotta bust, around 1750, a mature work that embodies his quest for purity, balance and modernity. The sculptor used classical codes, which he subtly blended with Florentine Renaissance features, such as the cut-out below the shoulders, similar to that found on reliquary busts. This form is particularly unusual in the context of the production of classical Venetian busts with established and codified characteristics, still used in the Sappho bust or Ideal Head (Rhode Island School of Design Museum, inv. 59.095), which twentieth-century historians place with our model in a series of Marchiori's ‘ideal heads’.
Two other versions of Flora are known. The first in marble, from the former collection of the Marquis Sugana, is conserved at the Museo civico in Treviso. The second, also in terracotta, is in a private collection (Cat.exp. Éblouissante Venise : Venise, les arts et l'Europe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Grand Palais, 2018, cat. 81). All three are placed on highly ornamented Rococo wooden bases, probably made by the artist, who, it should be remembered, began his career as a woodcarver. Sappho of Rhode Island also rests on a finely crafted pedestal painted by Giambattista Crosato, a friend of the sculptor. Although the pedestals of Flora are not painted like Crosato's, the great attention paid to the execution of the pedestals is recurrent, testifying to a desire to magnify the sculpture through its support and to create a ‘total work’.