Bronze From The Grand Tour Attributed To F. Righetti, Drunken Satyr, Rome, Italy Ca. 1820.

Small bronze with an antique green patina representing the Drunken Satyr from the Villa dei Paperi, very beautiful lost wax casting to compare with the works of Francesco Righetti, Rome, circa 1810.
This antique green patina is typical for Righetti. Italian sculptor, goldsmith and bronze founder. He quickly became the successor of his teacher Luigi Valadier, a great Roman goldsmith who also produced copies after the antique, and responded with skill and energy to collectors' taste for faithful replicas of famous statues, ancient and modern, and ancient ornaments. Righetti worked on large-scale projects for popes and monarchs, but he is best remembered for his small bronze statuettes based on famous antiques. In 1781, Righetti received his first known large-scale commission, namely 12 life-size lead casts of famous statues for the English banker Henry Hope at his country house in Welgelegen, near Haarlem (7 are still in situ). Painted white to resemble marble, the statues chosen were mainly classical works such as Medici's Venus and Apollino (both in Florence, Uffizi) but also included some more recent statues, such as Giambologna's Mercury (version, Florence , Bargello) and Saint Suzanne by François Duquesnoy (Rome, Santa Maria di Loreto). During the 1780s, Righetti established himself as a producer of bronze miniatures based on famous antique prototypes, a genre of sculpture that developed in the second half of the 18th century in response to the art market in booming. Like any metal casting project, Righetti's business was built on collaboration. Besides the workshop staff, which included his son Luigi, Righetti is known to have employed other artists to sculpt for him. Documentary sources indicate, for example, that the sculptor Camillo Pacetti copied antiquities for Righetti in 1785. In 1794, Righetti published a price list in the form of a catalog of the miniature statues available in his workshop, a document which testifies both of the scale of his production and his talent for promotion. Pope Pius VII visited Righetti's workshop in Naples in 1801 to view the gilded bronze altar service he had commissioned for San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, and in 1805 Righetti became head of the Vatican foundry. In 1809, in his capacity as a bronze caster, Righetti collaborated with Antonio Canova to create the giant bronze figure of Napoleon (Brera, Milan) for Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, the French viceroy of Italy. In 1819, Righetti and his son Luigi cast Canova's monumental equestrian Charles III, which still stands in front of the royal palace in Naples. His son Luigi ran the Neapolitan workshop in his absence, and after Righetti's death, Luigi and his son Francesco Righetti the Younger ran the Neapolitan and Roman foundries. The family's works, highly prized and most easily transportable, are distributed in some of the most important European and American collections.