Description
Anyone in Britain, France, or Italy interested in nineteenth-century sculpture, will have encountered Baron Carlo Marochetti RA (1805–1867). Born in Turin, the son of an Italian lawyer, he moved to Paris at an early age and trained as a sculptor under F.-J. Bosio and A.-J. Gros. After France’s July Revolution of 1830, Marochetti’s work took on a romantic inflection, very evident in the dynamic equestrian statue of Emanuele Filiberto (see front cover) he executed for Turin, and in the major commissions he received from the French state. These included a colossal battle relief for the Arc de Triomphe and a group of the Exaltation of Mary Magdalene, for the church of La Madeleine in Paris. The distinctive colossal angels in the Madeleine group find many later echoes, including the Angel of the Resurrection for Cawnpore, India.
Following the Revolution of 1848, the sculptor moved permanently to Britain, where he had already received the order for a statue of the Duke of Wellington astride his horse, for Glasgow. In total, Marochetti was to make eight equestrian statues, best-known of which was his outside Parliament in London, finally erected in 1860. It was cast in his own workshop in Sydney Mews, South Kensington; Marochetti was unusual among sculptors in having established his own foundry.
His success provoked xenophobic hostility amongst British sculptors. He appeared to win prestigious commissions, sometimes without entering an initial design in competition. The question, ever asked, was whether Baron Carlo won these commissions because of royal and other connections. But Marochetti was extremely capable: Queen Victoria declared he was ‘the only sculptor – positively the only one in England – of really transcendental genius’. He produced fifteen pieces in the Royal Collection and a list of one hundred and fifty works in Britain. These included recumbent effigies of Victoria and Albert in the Royal Mausoleum, national monuments, portrait busts and bronze statues of notable persons. His public statues of railway engineers Isambard Brunel, Robert Stephenson, and other eminent figures, show him competing with contemporary photographers in modern costume realism.
This is the first full-length study of the sculptor in English, and the first since Marco Calderini’s slim biography in Italian, almost a century ago. In the intervening years Marochetti scholarship has made enormous advances, adding richly to the material with in-depth research studies that include the context and political background to the international sculptor’s life and works in three countries. The contributions of two Marochetti specialists, Caroline Hedengren Dillon (France), and Alberto Pirro (Italy), making use of their own countries’ archival resources, complete this exciting and long-awaited new volume.
Front cover : Carlo Marochetti, Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy, bronze, 1837, Piazza S. Carlo, Turin (Photo: Alberto Pirro).
