Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869)

Sculptor born on 11 November 1789 in Torano di Carrara, Tuscany, the son of Ceccardo Tenerani, head quarryman at the marble quarries, and Maria Antonia Marchetti, sister of Pietro Marchetti, professor of sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara. On his uncle’s recommendation, Tenerani entered the Accademia in 1803 and trained under the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini and the French painter Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais. In 1811 he won first prize for a life-size model and in 1813 a scholarship to study in Rome. He moved there in 1814 and in 1816 won an award instituted by Canova for a figure of the Risen Redeemer. He was in contact with both Canova and Thorvaldsen but became the latter’s student and collaborator. In 1816 he exhibited the plaster model for the sculpture which established his reputation, Psyche Abandoned. A marble version (now in the Uffizi) was commissioned by Carlotta de’ Medici Lenzoni of Florence, with further marbles commissioned by the German statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich, the French general Auguste Bertin de Veaux and the British politician, Henry Labouchère, 1st Baron Taunton. It has been suggested that the last of these is the marble sold as lot 60 at Christie’s in July 2023; dated 1845, it is possibly also the version that Tenerani sent from Rome to the Royal Academy in 1846. Following the success of Psyche Abandoned, in 1822 Tenerani created a variant subject, Psyche Fainting. Also a success, the earliest marble is probably the one in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; what was possibly a later version was shown at South Kensington’s International Exhibition of 1862 where the Art Journal (1862, p. 213) declared of it that ‘no work is more exquisite, or has achieved greater renown’. Also from this period is Cupid Removing a Thorn from Venus’s Foot. Again, patrons from several European countries commissioned copies in marble, among them, William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, for Chatsworth, his mansion in Derbyshire. In 1849, Albert, Prince Consort, became one of six patrons to purchase a marble of Tenerani’s 1835 subject, Flora (or Spring); originally installed at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, it was intended as a pendant to R.J. Wyatt’s Glycera. Although the Neoclassical style of Canova and Thorvaldsen remains strong in these ideal works, Tenerani was also one of the co-signatories, alongside Friedrich Overbeck and Tomasso Minardi, to Antonio Bianchini’s 1843 manifesto, Del Purismo nelle Arti (On Purism in the Arts), which espoused a move away from Neoclassicism to Realism and from antiquity to the Quattrocento, replacing mythological with Christian themes. The effect of Purismo on Tenerani’s work can be seen most clearly in his funerary monuments and his portraits. Five of the former were executed for British clients: the monument to Mary Bold, Princess Sapieha (d. 1824), in St Luke’s, Farnworth, Widnes, Lancashire, comprising a classicising relief of the dying woman being visited by an Angel pointing to an hourglass; monuments to the 2nd Marchioness (d. 1830) and the 2nd Marquess (d. 1851) of Northampton, in the church of St Mary Magdalene Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire, the former comprising a relief illustrating the marchioness performing an act of Christian charity and the latter a statue of a seated Angel of the Resurrection; the monument to Jessie Vivian, who died in 1848, aged 22, after giving birth to her son, in the Vivian Chapel, St Paul’s Church, Sketty, Swansea, comprising a marble figure of a Guardian Angel standing protectively over a child seated on the ground; and the monument to Agnes Jones (d. 1868), originally in the chapel of the workhouse at Brownlow Hill, Liverpool (in which the deceased had worked as a nurse), now in the Oratory, St James’s Cemetery, comprising – as with the Marquess of Northampton – a seated Angel of the Resurrection. Tenerani’s portrait busts in Britain include Henri, Duc de Bordeaux (1844, Burton Constable Hall, East Riding of Yorkshire); Pellegrino Rossi (1848, Victoria and Albert Museum); and a bust of an unidentified woman (1853, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).

Bibliography: B. Bailey et al, Northamptonshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2013, pp. 57, 159; P. Bucarelli, ‘Tenerani, Pietro’, Enciclopedia Italiana (1937), via Trecanni; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, p. xii; Florentia [F.M. Elliot], ‘A Walk through the Studios of Rome’, Part IV, Art Journal, 1854, pp. 350–51; Count H. Le Grice, Walks through the Studii of the Sculptors at Rome (2 vols), Rome, 1841, vol. I, pp. 68–77, vol. II, pp. 236–243; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 105, 114–17, 232, 256; J. Newman, Glamorgan (The Buildings of Wales), New Haven and London, 1995, p. 618, pl. 93; N. Penny, Church Monuments in Romantic England, New Haven and London, 1977, p. 164, pl. 123; R. Pollard et al, Lancashire: Liverpool and the South-West (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2006), 2022, pp. 68, 362, 655; O. Raggi, Della Vita e delle Opere di Pietro Tenerani, Florence, 1880; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 1229; A.M. Rybko, ‘Tenerani, Pietro’, Grove Art Online (2003); Wikipedia (Italian).

Terry Cavanagh, April 2026