Carlo Finelli Italian, 1786-1853

In the Iliad Homer described the shepherd Paris as being “beautiful as a God”.  He is famed for his judgement over the beauty of the three most powerful goddesses in Greek mythology and his part in the Trojan war, born out of his desire for Helen who was offered to him as a bribe by Venus during the judgement. 

Although we do not know for whom the present sculpture was made, it must have been for a patron within Finelli’s exclusive clientele of English, Russian and German collectors, which included the Duke of Devonshire, Prince Anatole Demidoff, the Russian Czar and the King of Bavaria. The present work had long been considered lost.  Finelli destroyed most of his plaster models in 1844.  His biographer Checchetelli wrote in 1854, only a year after Finelli’s death, that the sculpture of Paris was lost, as Finelli had destroyed the plaster and Checchetelli believed that he had never executed it in marble. The rediscovery of the present sculpture corrects the information given by Finelli’s biographer.

RELATED LITERATURE
G.Checchetelli, Carlo Finelli, Cenni Biografici, Rome, 1854;
G.Hubert, La sculpture dans l’Italie Napoleonienne, Paris, 1964; 
B.Musetti, Carlo Finelli (1782-1853), 2002;Praz, p.142;