Antonio Rossetti (1819–1889)

Sculptor working in marble. He was born in Milan where he trained with Francesco Somaini (1795–1855) before moving permanently to Rome in 1843. He executed a bust of Alessandro Volta for the Pincio, Rome, in 1849. For the Certosa di Bologna (Bologna’s cemetery) he carved the figural sculpture on the monuments to Teodoro Galitzin (signed and dated 1851) and his brother Michele Galitzin (signed and dated 1861) which had been designed by the architect Antonio Cipolla. Rossetti’s specialism was genre subjects (sometimes referred to as ‘drawing room’ sculptures). Finely carved, with minute attention to detail, and usually comprising sensual representations of young women, they were highly popular, especially with foreign collectors. As was the case with other Italian sculptors working in this field, his workshop produced multiple replicas, reductions and versions of his more popular models. For example, the earliest marble of his group, Esmeralda and the Goat (or Esmeralda and Djali), was executed for Tsar Nicholas I (before 1854, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia); a second was carved for William I of Württemberg (presumably the copy now in the Liebieghaus Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany); there are two in Philadelphia, USA: in the Union League of Philadelphia and in the Drexel University collection; a fifth, signed and dated 1867, was sold through Bonhams, New York, in 2012; and a small version (h. 54cm), signed and dated 1859, was sold through Sotheby’s, London, in 2022. In the 1850s Rossetti produced a model of a young female slave, seated and nude apart from a turban upon her head and a piece of drapery slung over her right leg. A marble copy in the Botanic Gardens, Kibble Palace, Glasgow, known locally as The Nubian Slave, is undoubtedly misnamed, as the subject has idealised European facial features and must be intended, in common with contemporary works by Hiram Power and Scipione Tadolini, as a young Greek woman enslaved by the Turks during the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s. Indeed, Mrs Jameson, in her 1854 handbook of modern sculptures at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, gives a description of a plaster of Rossetti’s Greek Slave which exactly matches the marble in Glasgow. A small-scale variation on this theme, here entitled Nubian Slave Girl, is in the Bankfield Museum, Halifax. Among Rossetti’s most popular models is a young woman seated on a stool, nude apart from some swathes of drapery around her hips and legs, braiding her hair as she reads from a book resting on her right thigh. Most commonly referred to as The Reading Girl, it is also known as Self Help and Time is Precious. One sold through Christie’s, New York, in 2017, was dated 1870; and there are at least two in the United Kingdom, one, in the Walker Art Gallery, is dated 1873, and the other, dated 1883, is in Lichfield Library. As with the Glasgow and Halifax sculptures, both of these were bequeathed to the respective institutions from private collections. In its review of the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, the Art Journal (1 July 1867, p. 174) had high praise for Rossetti’s Ophelia, noting its ‘tenderness and moving pathos’ and its exquisitely delicate execution. Although Rossetti’s studio continued to satisfy the demand for his more popular models, the same magazine noted a falling off in the production of new designs in the 1870s, explaining: ‘Ill health and other causes have prevented this clever sculptor from recently adding any fresh subjects to the many works of Art which have emanated from his chisel.’

Bibliography: Art Journal, 1 November 1854, pp. 322–24 (‘A Walk through the Studios of Rome, Part III’); Benezit Dictionary of Artists (Oxford Art Online); Mrs Jameson, ‘A Handbook to the Courts of Modern Sculpture’, London, 1854, pp. 57–58, nos 156, 157 (where the sculptor is incorrectly named Giovanni Rossetti), in The Fine Arts’ Courts in the Crystal Palace (2nd Series), Sydenham, London, 1860; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, p. 20; Mapping Sculpture; R. Martoreli and A. Panzetta, ‘Antonio Rossetti’, at Storia e Memoria di Bologna; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 88–89; A. Panzetta, Scultori Italiani dell’Ottocento e del Primo Novecento, Turin, 1993, vol. 1, p. 238.

Terry Cavanagh, January 2025