Italian sculptor born in Novate in the province of Milan. He attended the Milan Academy where his tutors included the painters Giuseppe Sogni, Luigi Sabatelli and Francesco Hayez and the sculptors Antonio Labus and Antonio Galli. He moved to Rome in 1856 where he worked in the studios of Pietro Magni and Orazio Andreoni, and in 1869 set up his own studio, achieving international popularity with his biblical, mythological and genre subjects, usually taking the form of an attractive young woman, with attributes, invariably carved from marble. As with the work of his best Milanese contemporaries, naturalistic details are exquisitely and minutely carved, setting off the smoothly polished surfaces intended to represent flesh. Two examples of Ciniselli’s work in this field are in public locations in the United Kingdom, The Reading Girl and Ruth. The Reading Girl is in Manchester City Library; it was purchased in Italy by the first chairman of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, Daniel Adamson, and given to the library by his descendants in 1939. Ciniselli’s Reading Girl is clearly indebted to Magna’s Reading Girl, the great popular success of the 1861 Esposizione Nationale Italiana at Florence and the 1862 International Exhibition at South Kensington. While demand for copies of Ciniselli’s Reading Girl was not as great as that for Magni’s, Ciniselli’s studio made at least one other copy, which is now in Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, USA. Ruth, c.1880, is in the conservatory of the Botanic Gardens (Kibble Palace), Glasgow, and was originally in the collection of the ship owner and art collector, Leonard Gow, whose family presented it to Glasgow in 1927; again, another carving from the Ciniselli studio (dated to the early 1880s) is in the USA, in the collection of the James V. Brown Library, Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Best known among Ciniselli’s other imaginary subjects are The Wiles of Love, Dawn and Dusk and Susanna. A marble Susanna, sold through Sotheby’s, New York, in 2015, is inscribed with, in addition to Ciniselli’s name, ‘Studio O. Andreoni’. Ciniselli also received commissions for portrait busts and statues, his most important public commission, unveiled in 1884, the year following his death, being the Monument to the Marquis da Bandeira in Lisbon, Portugal. At the 1881 Melbourne International Exhibition, where he exhibited two marble statues, First Sorrow and Susanna, and a veiled bust, Modesty, Ciniselli received an honourable mention (Third Order of Merit). He died in Rome and is buried, alongside his wife, in Cimitero Comunale Monumentale Campo Verano.
Bibliography: A. de Gubernatis, Dizionario degli Artisti Italiani Viventi. Pittori , Scultori e Architetti, Florence, 1889, p. 126; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 19–20; Melbourne International Exhibition 1880–1881. Official Record …, 1882, pp. xci, 262, 511; A. Panzetta, Nuovo Dizionario degli scultori Italiani dell’ottocento e del primo novecento, Turin, 2003, p. 220; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, p. 134.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2025