Pio Fedi Italian, 1816 - 1892

Alfonso Panzetta, Nuovo Dizionario degli scultori Italiani dell'ottocento e del primo novecento, G. Canale & C. spa, Borgaro, 2003, p. 389, pl. 719, the model illustrated.

Marble with surface dirt. Three small inherent losses to right side of butt with infill. Some minor discoloration to marble. Some minute chips to bottom edge. Small loss to outer right thigh, partially infilled. Some other very minor scattered natural losses to marble. Some discolor including two to right hand.
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An alert visitor to Florence who stands in the Piazza della Signoria and inspects the sculpture in the famous Loggia dei Lanzi, will be struck by an ambitious nineteenth-century marble group of the Rape of the Polyxena positioned between two seminal works from the Reaissance: Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines. Few people today, however, are familiar with the sculptor of this dramatic marble group. Modeled by Pio Fedi in 1855, it captured the political spirit of the time. The group was interpreted as the personification of the Risorgimento and resistance to domination by foreign powers: here Pyrrhus symbolizes Austrian rule of the terra irredenta (unredeemed land), as he tears Polyxena away from her mother Hecuba and tramples on her hapless brother Polites.

To have the group carved in marble became a cause celèbre, so that by the time it was inaugurated in 1866 it was the most talked of sculpture in Italy, thus propelling the previously little known Fedi to fame and rendering him the leading Florentine sculptor of the 1860s.

Fedi's training had been with two of Italy's great marble masters, first Lorenzo Bartolini in Florence, and subsequently Pietro Tenerani in Rome. The influences of both can be seen in Fedi's combination of robust naturalism, which stemmed from Bartolini, suffused with the neo-classical vocabulary of Tenerani. His earlier work included various civic commissions, for instance Niccolo Pisarro for the doors of the Uffizi. Through the 1850s he was court sculptor to the Grand Duke Leopold II until the duke's exile in 1859.

It was, however, as a marble carver that Fedi excelled, and his technical excellence is superbly demonstrated in this lot. Il genio della pesca depicts a boy effortlessly standing on the back of a dolphin, skimming along a wave as he casts his finely meshed net into the deep. His luxuriant hair is adorned with seashells and reeds, a serene half-smile on his face as he focuses on his fishing, his body sculpted to perfection. Il genio is dated 1864, only one year before the completion of the didactic Rape of Polyxena in 1865. But our 'genie of the deep' could hardly be of greater contrast in spirit, a beguiling and exuberant rococo figure.