Sculpture By Luigi Pagani, "la Toilette Della Maschera", White Marble With Painted Wooden Base

Sculpture by Luigi Pagani, "La toilette della maschera", white marble with painted wooden base, cm 73.5 x 44 x 27.

The sculpture is credibly identifiable with the marble "La toilette della maschera" sent to Brera in 1870, even if the work bears the date 1871 probably added at a later stage.

The marble reflects the tendencies of Lombard sculpture, oriented towards a research in which the author tends to combine beauty and truth.

Which are nothing other than those values ​​in which the emerging Milanese bourgeoisie loved to recognize itself, appreciating a product that had to be first and foremost functional to the new political-economic establishment and therefore responding, more than to a cultural interest and commitment, to the more reassuring criterion of taste; a taste that is neither rhetorical nor courtly and, as such, congenial to the requests of the bourgeois client and therefore suitable for their salons for which it was intended.

The excellent formal qualities had to be decisive in this sense, entrusted to a plastic execution in which the stylistic preciousness was accompanied by a refined sophistication, an elaborate smoothness and masterly finishing, expertly enhanced by the value given by the light.