LUIGI PAMPALONI | PRAYING BOY

Pampaloni's Praying Boy was first executed in plaster in 1826, and commissioned for the funerary monument of Russian noblewoman Anna Potocki's youngest daughter. The model proved immensely popular and was repeated in marble and plaster. 

Luigi Pampaloni was a pupil of Lorenzo Bartolini at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara. The present work shows the influence of Bartolini's Neoclassicism on Pampaloni, but also shows Pampaloni's tendency for slightly more naturalistic, romantic genre sculpture. The innocence and sentimentality of the present work is rivalled by the technical mastery in the modeling of the cushion, which is naturalistically rendered with wrinkles and folds, created by the weight of the body on the cushion.