Musidora - Odoardo FANTACCHIOTTI (1809-1877)

Sculpture made in white Carrara marble
signed on the side on the base " O. Fantacchiotti "

Italy
around 1862
height 110 cm
diameter 33 cm

The model of that sculpture was presented at the 1862 London Universal Exhibition.

The title "Musidora" is inspired by the poem Summer by James Thomson, published in 1727, in which a young man unwittingly sees a young woman bathing naked: he is then torn between his desire to contemplate her and the moral need that he feels having to look away.

Biography :
Odoardo Fantacchiotti (1809-1877) was an Italian sculptor. In 1820 he entered the Academy of Florence, where he was a student of Stefano Ricci then of Aristodemo Costoli. In 1837, he executed the bust of Pénélope Bourbon by Petrella Tommasi (Cortona, S. Francesco) and in 1839 he exhibited the "Massacre of the Innocents" at the Academy.

In 1840, Fantacchiotti was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, which earned him numerous public commissions: for the Uffizi portico, he delivered the statues of Boccaccio (1837-43) and dell'Accorso (1846 -52); for the Galileo tribune, he sculpted the medallion of Francesco Redi (1840-41) and the bust of Ferdinand II de Medici (1842).

In 1858, Odoardo Fantacchiotti, developing his art towards a classicism aimed at exalting beauty and grace, evoking the great Italian masters Antonio Canova and Lorenzo Bartolini, completed the three most important works of his career: "Eve tempted by the serpent", our "Musidora" and the funerary monument of Luisa Teresa Renard, wife of the painter William Blundel Spence (Fiesole). These works were successful at the Italian Exhibition in Florence in 1861, then at the Universal Exhibitions in London in 1862 and Paris in 1867. They earned him the medal of merit in 1861 and the cross of merit from the King of Portugal in 1867.