ATTRIBUTED TO LORENZO BARTOLINI, CIRCA 1837

Lorenzo Bartolini, despite being imbued with the Classical spirit during his years of study in Rome and Paris in the shadow of Canova and David, proved far more independent- minded and open to wider influences than many of his contemporaries. It was probably David, in whose studio he spent some of his early year, who introduced him to the art of the Quattrocento, an interest he was to share with his friend and contemporary, Jean-Dominique Ingres. Bartolini was much in vogue at the court of Napoleon, to whom he showed great loyalty, going so far as to follow the deposed Emperor into exile on Elba. However he had moved to Florence by 1815, and was to remain there for the rest of his life. His connection with the Napoleonic regime excluded him for some time from official commissions in Italy, and during the second two decades of the 19th century he found his market creating portraits and 'ideal' subjects principally for foreigners passing through Florence. Increasingly he combined elements of neo-Renaissance with his Neo-classicism, and in the 1820s Titian's Venus (Uffizi, Florence) gave him the inspiration for his Reclining Venus (c1822) for the 3rd Marquiss of Londonderry, and a Reclining Bacchante (1823) for the 6th Duke of Devonshire. By the mid-1820s his reputation both at home and abroad was firmly established and he was to receive many important public and private commissions, sometimes executing them in a sober Neo-classical style, others neo-Renaissance, some tinged with naturalism, and some a mixture. By the time of his death in 1850 he was recognized as one of Europe's leading contemporary sculptors.

The present model is known as the Nymph with a Scorpion, and represents one of the many compositions which Bartolini executed in the latter part of his career which include young female nudes. The original plaster was included in the Bartolini exhibition of 1978 (loc. cit.), and at least two marble versions are documented, one of them now in the Hermitage, and the other unlocated.